Louise Mackintosh (1864-1933) was a British actor who made the first of many appearances on Broadway in 1902.
Mackintosh started out in films with credited roles in pictures shot in New York city, including Chickie (1925), which starred her compatriot Dorothy Mackaill. She went on to play character parts in over a dozen films, both credited and uncredited.
Her final role, completed shortly before her death, was as one of the teachers in MGM’s Going Hollywood.
The screen immortality of Clara Blanchard Dickey (1876-1962) rests on her role as Dorothy’s Auntie Em in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. Playing aunts was something of a speciality: she was Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly in three different pictures, and Esther Blodgett’s Aunt Mattie in A Star is Born (1937), amongst many others.
Blandick made her stage debut in Boston at the age of 21, and made her first Broadway appearance in 1903, in Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. She continued to work on Broadway and in touring productions.
Some sources claim she made her first film in 1908, but the earliest appearance identified by the AFI is Mrs Black is Back (19140, an adaptation of a Broadway hit made by Famous Players.
Blandick was part of the 1929 exodus to Hollywood, where she worked as a character actor until the early fifties, sometimes credited, sometimes not, and well over 100 pictures in total. She played the snooty mother in Shopworn (1932) and was uncredited in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932). Blandick was credited again in Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and DeMille’s North West Mounted Police (1940), and uncredited in Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943).
As well as The Wizard of Oz, Blandick appeared without credit in three other MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, The Big Store and Du Barry was a Lady.
The King’s Men was a musical quartet formed in 1928 by Kenneth ‘Ken’ Lorin Darby (1909-92) and also comprising Jon Dodson [Blunt] (1907-63), Grafton ‘Bud’ Linn (1909-68) and Radburn ‘Rad’ Brown Robinson.
The group sang on radio in the Hollywood area before being invited by Paul Whiteman to appear with his orchestra. They were later the backing singers on Bing Crosby’s recording of ‘White Christmas’.
The King’s Men appeared on screen in a number of films during the 1930s and 40s, including five MGM musicals: Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, Honolulu, Cairo and For Me and My Gal. In addition, they provided singing voices for the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They also undertook vocal work for Disney animations.
Ken Darby had a varied and successful career in Hollywood. In addition to his appearances with the King’s Men, he was a composer and musical arranger, winning three Academy Awards. The films he worked on included The Wizard of Oz and At the Circus for MGM, Disney features such as Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (942), and The King and I (1956), Porgy and Bess (1957) and Camelot (1962). He was also musical director on non-musicals such as How the West Was Won (1962).
Darby also worked as a vocal coach, including with Marilyn Monroe in several pictures, and coached the chorus onThe Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).
Harry Jerome Bowen (1888-1941) appeared in well over 160 films. The majority were shorts and he was generally, though not always, uncredited. His first appearance was probably in the ‘Little Rascals’ short Your Own Back Yard (1925).
Bowen’s feature films included King Kong (1933), Flying Down to Rio (1933), Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) and The Milky Way (1936).
Harry Bowen was in two MGM musicals, Going Hollywood and The Bohemian Girl.
The Radio Rogues was a comedy trio comprising James Nicholas ‘Jimmy’ Hollywood (1895-1955), Edward ‘Eddie’ Bartell (1907-91) and Henry Taylor (1907-69). They were essentially impressionists, performing standard songs with jokes and celebrity mimicry.
The trio appeared as comic relief in a number of feature films during the 1930s, including the MGM musical Going Hollywood, and starred in a few comedy shorts.
All three occasionally appeared solo in low budget pictures, and Taylor also did some work as a screenwriter.
A fourth performer, impressionist Sydney ‘Syd’ Chatton appears to have also performed with Hollywood and Bartell, including in the Broadway production of Helzapoppin’ (1938).
Robert Watson Knucher (1888-1965) started out in vaudeville as a teenager, and also toured the United States with a travelling medicine show. He moved up through appearing in shows at Coney Island, to a Broadway debut in 1918, where he continued to work.
Watson made his first film in 1925 in That Royle Girl, a minor work by D W Griffith. He went on to appear, usually uncredited, in around ninety pictures, including: China Seas (1935), Captains Courageous (1937), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943, and one of nine pictures in which he played Adolf Hitler), The Big Clock (1948, and a rare credited role as one of the employees at Janoth Publications), A Foreign Affair (1948, and Hitler again) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962, his last film and playing Hitler).
Bobby Watson acted in five MGM musicals, though he was credited only in the first, playing the press agent Thompson in Going Hollywood. The uncredited appearances were in Born to Dance, Singin’ in the Rain (as the diction coach in ‘Moses Supposes’), The Band Wagon and Deep in my Heart.
Bridget Sarah Veronica Rose Kelly (1910-81) started out in show business as Frank Fay’s stooge in vaudeville before quickly moving on to Broadway shows, in which she performed alongside many of the top comedians of the day.
Kelly’s earliest confirmed film appearance is the lead role in The Grand Dame (1931), a Vitaphone short shot in New York. Nineteen-thirty-three was an important year: she had an important supporting role in MGM’s musical Going Hollywood, playing Marion Davies’s best friend; and Hal Roach chose her to replace ZaSu Pitts as Thelma Todd’s partner in a series of comedy shorts. Pitts had played her usual scatty self, while Kelly was the ultimate wisecracking dame.
Throughout the 1930s, Kelly appeared as smart-mouthed support in comedies and musicals, including Every Night at Eight (1935) and Pigskin Parade (1936), and she was the female lead in the creepy comedy The Gorilla (1939), with Bela Lugosi and the Ritz Brothers.
It is believed that Kelly’s career declined in the 1940s because of her insistence on living her life as an out lesbian. Returning to New York, she entertained the troops during the war, and performed on radio and in summer stock. She also worked as personal assistant to Tallulah Bankhead.
Supporting work in films opened up to her again in the 1960s, and she also worked extensively on television. She made a successful return to Broadway in 1971 in a revival of No, No, Nanette, followed by another revival, Irene, in 1973.
Patsy Kelly made one other musical at MGM, starring in Nobody’s Baby.
Canadian Edward Arthur Sparkman (1883-1957) made his film debut in silent pictures, a medium only partly suited to an actor whose unique presence relied on two attributes: yes, a deadpan face, but also, and most importantly, a monotone, nasal voice that seemed to deride everything around it.
Sparks developed his unique style in one of the many Broadway productions in which he appeared after 1912. (His early life had been a gallimaufry of unlikely incidents, including gold prospecting and studying for the ministry.)
After over thirty silent films, initially made in New York studios, Sparks made his talkie debut in The Big Noise(1928), an Allan Dwan production for First National. He went on to steal scenes in about fifty more pictures, including 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Lady for a Day (1933), Imitation of Life (1934) and Magic Town (1947), his final appearance, made as a favour to James Stewart. It was his proud boast that he never smiled in any of them.
Sparks was only in one MGM musical, Going Hollywood, where he began a lifelong friendship with Bing Crosby.
For fans of low-budget programmers, Stuart Erwin (1903-67) lives on as the first actor to play comic-strip boxer Joe Palooka on screen, in Palooka (1934).
Erwin started acting at the University of California, and went on to work in Los Angeles stock theatre companies. He broke into films with a role in Mother Knows Best (1928), Fox’s first talking picture.
He went on to make over 100 films, usually in credited supporting roles, but with a few leads. Even though he was the star of Pigskin Parade (1936), he was perversely nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category at the Academy Awards.
Erwin’s films were generally not prestigious, and he was arguably more successful in radio and television.
Stuart Erwin featured in just one MGM musical, playing the producer and financial backer of the film being made in Going Hollywood.
The first two screen appearances of Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier (1904-83) were in They Had to See Paris and Hot for Paris (both 1929). Her characters also epitomized Parisian gaiety and ‘ooh-la-la’. But she was actually a French-Canadian who never went to France, or anywhere else outside North America, in her life.
D’Orsay moved to New York as a young woman and found work in a revue by claiming to have experience at the Folies Bergère.She later took her surname from a brand of perfume. She worked in vaudeville until moving to Hollywood and achieving short-lived stardom until she foolishly walked out on a contract with Fox in 1936 and found it difficult to obtain work.
She then returned to vaudeville, taking film roles when she could get them, and worked right through to the early seventies. In 1971, D’Orsay played Solange, an aging French chorus girl in the original Broadway production of Follies.
One of D’Orsay’s best roles was as the awful Lili in MGM’s Going Hollywood. She made one other musical for the studio, playing Marcelle in the French-language version of The Merry Widow.
