An actor named David Reese (dates unknown) has a single entry in the AFI Catalogue, for playing a bit part in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle.
A performer named David Reese appeared in a Broadway show called The Red Canary in 1914.
They may have been the same person.
One online source claims that the real name of Jacques Vanaire (1888-1954) was August Jack van Roosendael who went to the United States to breed cattle. Whatever the truth of this, he was certainly a Belgian who spent a dozen or so years playing Frenchmen in Hollywood.
Vanaire appeared in about sixty films, including French language versions of studio films. They included Le spectre vert (1930, apparently the first French film made in Hollywood), Jewel Robbery (1932), Sylvia Scarlett (1936), Jezebel (1938), Ninotchka (1939), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941) and Holiday Inn (1942).
He was uncredited in five MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Everybody Sing, Swiss Miss and I Married an Angel.
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.
Burly character actor Dewey Robinson (1898-1950) appeared in well over 200 feature films in a Hollywood career lasting less than twenty years.
Robinson started out as a stage actor, and was in a couple of Broadway productions during the 1920s. In 1931, he was cast as Big Tony Catello in Enemies of the Law, the first of many roles as criminals, and the next year had a small part in I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
Notable films featuring Robinson include Blonde Venus (1932), She Done Him Wrong (1933), Roman Scandals (1933, as the slave auctioneer), Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935, as Snug the joiner), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), The Ghost Ship (1943), Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) and The Bells of St Mary’s (1945).
Robinson was a member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, and appeared in eight of the director’s pictures, including playing the sheriff in Sullivan’s Travels (1941).
Dewey Robinson can be seen in uncredited roles in nine MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Student Tour, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1938, The Big Store, Two Sisters from Boston, Fiesta, Neptune’s Daughter and That Midnight Kiss.
J H Peters (dates unknown) is another of those mysterious performers who made a couple of appearances in 1930s’ Hollywood pictures, then disappeared. His case is made even more mysterious by the fact that we do not even know what his first names were.
One of Peters’s roles was in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle.
William Earl Oxford (1906-81) was a singer and actor who made his Broadway debut in 1930. He continued to feature in Broadway shows for the next twenty years, and also pursued a successful recording career.
Oxford made his first appearance on screen singing at the start of Should Ladies Behave (1933). He made a handful of appearances in features and shorts up till 1936, and then gave up on Hollywood. Two of the films were MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and (allegedly) The Merry Widow.
He made one final appearance, as Sgt Earl Oxford, in the Warner Bros wartime Irving Berlin extravaganza, This is the Army (1943).
Discrepancies between IMDb and the AFI Catalogue are normal when it comes to actors’ work. It is usually claimed that this is because, while the former is crowd sourced and includes short films and television appearances, the former is restricted to feature films and based on scholarly research.
However true this may be (and the AFI listings are full of very unscholarly errors), it cannot account for the fact that French-born Achille Nardelli (1895-1973) was in 194 feature films in forty years, while the AFI lists only twenty-one titles in 27 years. One of them is wrong, and on this occasion I suspect it is the AFI. Its list just does not look like anyone’s career, not least because of the ten-year gap from 1939 to 1949.
Both sources agree that Nardelli was in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and The Toast of New Orleans. IMDb maintains that he was also uncredited in The Merry Widow, A Night at the Opera, San Francisco, Ship Ahoy, Panama Hattie, The Great Caruso, Lili, Deep in my Heart, Ten Thousand Bedrooms, Silk Stockings and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
Harold R Minger (1895-1976) was a theatre actor active on Broadway in the 1920s, including in multiple editions of the Grand Street Follies, in which he performed alongside James Cagney in 1928.
Minjir travelled to Hollywood, like so many others, in the early years of sound. IMDb suggests he did an uncredited bit in Cagney’s The Public Enemy (1931), but the AFI states his first film as being a featured supporting role in Daughter of the Dragon (1931), the last of Warner Oland’s Fu Manchu pictures, and also starring Anna May Wong.
He went on to make around sixty films, including Jewel Robbery (1932), Wife vs Secretary (1936), Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and Blondie (1938), the first in the Dagwood and Blondie series.
Minjir’s last decent role was in The Great Commandment (1939), a strange independent production in which he played the apostle Andrew. After that, he was restricted to small, uncredited appearances in films including Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) and, at the age of 50, he walked away from Hollywood. It may be presumed he returned to the stage, but no information seems readily available.
Minjir appeared as the travel bureau agent in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle.
There are various claims about the real name and dates of actor George Le Guere. IMDb states he was George Mullally (1887-1947). Wikipedia opts for George Le Guere Mullally (1881-1947). A website devoted to Thanhauser Production, a New York company for whom he made one of his early films, agrees with IMDb’s dates, but says his birth name was Francis Jellinack.
It is certain that George Le Guere worked steadily on Broadway from 1906 to 1934, in both new plays and revivals. He was persona non grata for a while, after walking off stage in mid-performance in 1913, and it was during this period that he made his first films, presumably driven on screen by the need to eat. Le Guere appeared in six features in 1915, for a variety of New York studios, and continued to work in the medium even after his Broadway career restarted. In 1917, he played Adam Moore in a series of seven films based around the seven deadly sins.
Le Guere’s final appearances, working in Hollywood in the early 30s, were uncredited, the final one being in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle.
Robert Graves Jr (1888-1954) was a stage actor who made his Broadway debut while in his mid-twenties.
Graves made his feature film debut in 1925, and went on to make almost sixty features, plus many shorts. He was a character actor, and made appearances in Blonde Venus (1932), Dante’s Inferno (1935), The Whole Town’s Talking (1935) and Mad Love (1935).
He appeared in two MGM musicals, uncredited both times. They were The Cat and the Fiddle and Naughty Marietta.
