The parents of Katharine Irving (1907-94) were both actors working in Hollywood, so it was probably inevitable that she and her sister Dorothy would also appear in pictures.
Irving made her debut in 1927, but was only in half a dozen films before marrying and moving to Minnesota, where he spent the rest of her life. Her final appearance, and only credit, was as Spider Girl in Madam Satan.
Elena Caterina Catardi (1892-1966) was an Italian actor who only made about forty films in a career lasting as many years.
De Liguoro was a successful concert pianist who was persuaded by her director-husband to try screen acting. She made her debut in 1921, and in 1923 starred as the eponymous Princess Savitri in Savitri Satyavan.
Most of De Liguoro’s films were made in Italy, although she worked in several other countries, including the United States, where she made Madam Satan. MGM billed her, without any apparent justification, as Countess De Liguoro.
Rina De Liguoro resumed her concert career in the 1930s, and her final film appearance was in Visconti’s The Leopard (1963).
Earl Leslie Rengstorff Askam (1891-1940) was an opera singer and stage and film actor, who achieved cult immortality by playing Officer Torch in Flash Gordon (1936). He also played in a dozen low-budget westerns.
Askam was the Pirate at the zeppelin ball in Madam Satan. As was most often the case, he appeared uncredited in The Great Ziegfeld.
Albert Maroica Blasius Franz Maria, Ritter Conti von Cedassamare (1887-1967) came from Austrian aristocracy and was born and raised in an area that is now in Italy.
After serving in the First World War, Conti emigrated to America in 1919. He worked in a series of manual jobs, then responded to an advertisement by Erich Von Stroheim, who was seeking an Austrian military officer to act as technical adviser on The Merry-Go-Round (1923). He was given a part in the film, and this launched his career as an actor who would make well over 100 films.
Conti worked on several other Von Stroheim pictures, and otherwise played character roles, frequently continental and often military, as in Morocco (1930) and The Black Cat (1934). He was often uncredited.
Conti played the Empire Officer in Madam Satan and appeared without credit in The Night is Young.
Martha Sleeper (1910-83) reversed the usual actor’s journey of her day by starting out in films and transitioning to Broadway.
Sleeper made her first film appearance in 1923, aged 12. She was spotted by Hal Roach, who signed her to appear in comedy sorts. She appeared in a number of early films directed by Leo McCarey.
Aged 17, Sleeper was selected as a WAMPAS Baby Star, and played the lead in half-a-dozen pictures in 1928-29 for a minor studio. She was then signed by MGM and played many supporting roles. Two of these were as Fish Girl in Madam Satan and an uncredited appearance in Hollywood Party.
Sleeper was unhappy with the work she was doing, and began seeking roles in local stage productions. In 1936, she effectively retired from screen acting and moved with her husband to New York, where she worked for ten years both on and off Broadway. She also began designing jewellery.
Sleeper made one last film in 1945, The Bells of St Mary’s, as a favour to Leo McCarey. In 1949, she relocated to Puerto Rico, where she began designing clothes, running her own business for twenty years.
Julanne Johnston (1900-88) was a dancer who appeared in her first film in 1917. Her big chance came when Douglas Fairbanks cast her as the Princess in The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
Unfortunately, after a few years, including one film in Germany, her career fizzled out and by 1929 she was doing small supporting roles, one of which was as Miss Conning Tower in Madam Satan.
Johnston retired in 1934.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Kozlov ((1882-1956) was a Russian ballet dancer who, from 1901, toured with the Diaghilev company.
After touring internationally for some years, Kosloff settled in the United States in 1912, staging ballets in New York and providing choreography for Broadway musicals.
In 1917, Agnes DeMille encouraged her uncle Cecil to use Kosloff’s talents in one of his films. He made his acting debut in The Woman God Forgot (1917), and combined a film career with stage acting and ballet. He also opened a school of dance.Meanwhile, his private life became increasingly chaotic and, at times violent, as he maintained relationships with multiple women, some of them underage.
Kosloff acted in films throughout the 1920s, usually in ‘Latin lover’ roles, and mostly for DeMille. He more or less stopped acting after the introduction of sound, his last significant appearance being as Electricity in the ‘Ballet Mécanique’ in Madam Satan, to which it is also believe he contributed choreography (LeRoy Prinz being the credited dance director). His final screen appearance was as a dance instructor in Stage Door (1937).
Kosloff continued to work as a dance director, and his final contribution to cinema was work on DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956).
Ynez Seabury (1907-73) made her screen debut at the age of 4 in D W Griffith’s The Miser’s Heart (1911). She went on to make many other films for Griffith, as well as making her first stage appearance in 1912.
Seabury took a break from films in 1914, returning in 1923 to play a Native American for the first, but not the last, time. This aspect of her work reportedly led to her becoming close to members of the Hopi tribe.
Ynez Seabury worked sporadically in films through to 1949, usually in uncredited roles. She worked several times for Cecil B DeMille, and her last appearance was in his Samson and Delilah (1949).
She appeared in two Metro musicals, Madam Satan and The Girl of the Golden West (playing Wowkle, a Native American character).
One puzzle stands out in Seabury’s IMDb entry. She is said to have played a little girl in The Sign of the Cross (1932), but she would have been about 25 at the time.
Victor Hugo de Bierre (1886-1943) was an American citizen by virtue of the fact that he was born three hours after his French parents entered the country. He had worked as a bank clerk and begun training to be a lawyer when he decided to give it all up and take to the stage.
Having worked as a comedian and dancer, Brooke was appearing in No, No Nanette when Hal Roach signed him in 1925 to work in comedy shorts. He transitioned to features in 1928 with Howard Hawks’s Fazil, and made the move into talking pictures without any problems.
Brooke appeared in six MGM musicals, beginning with Madam Satan. He was uncredited in New Moon and The Merry Widow, then played the dentist in Here Comes the Band. He was uncredited again in the Wizard of Oz and I Married an Angel.
Brooke took his own life in 1943, and the press at the time claimed he had been depressed about unemployment, not having worked since making Little Old New York. IMDb lists eleven appearances following this, including I Married an Angel, so the reports of inactivity may have been exaggerated.
British stage actor Boyd Irwin (1880-1957) made his first films in Australia, starting in 1915. By 1920, he was working in Hollywood for pioneer filmmaker Bessie Barriscale.
Irwin worked throughout the 1920s, notably playing Rochefort in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921).
By the 1930s, his screen roles had diminished, though he was featured as the Zeppelin captain in Madam Satan. He also appeared, without credit, as the Swedish Ambassador in A Lady’s Morals. Irwin’s later appearances were all uncredited.
