Margaret Eugenia Jones (1917-2002) had three siblings who were also child actors, the most successful being her younger sister, Marcia Mae Jones. Margaret’s career lasted just ten years and comprised only five film appearances.
Her one MGM musical was also her final film: she played a student in Stage Mother.
Shirley Jean Rickert (1926-2009) was unfortunate enough to be the child of a stage mother, who hustled success in a baby contest into a Hollywood career for her child.
Rickert was in five of Hal Roach’s ‘Little Rascals’ pictures, and played Tomboy Taylor in Mickey Rooney’s Mickey McGuire series. She also played herself in the multi-studio charity fundraiser The Stolen Jools (1931).
When the child parts ended, Rickert continued to make occasional appearances in films, usually as a dancer or chorus girl, while pursuing a range of other jobs. During the 1950s she worked in burlesque as an exotic dancer (stripper), under the title ‘Gloria and her Crowning Glory’, a reference to her long blonde hair.
Rickert appeared in seven MGM musicals, starting with the aptly-named Stage Mother, where she played Maureen O’Sullivan as a child. Later on, she danced in Best Foot Forward, Meet the People, Good News, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain and I Love Melvin. All these appearances were uncredited.
Vaudeville performer Harrison Greene (1884-1945) crammed around 150 features and 100 shorts into his fifteen-year screen career. Rarely credited in ‘A’ pictures, he at least earned a medium closeup in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), one of his first appearances.
Greene’s parts were generally small, but more than simple walk-ons. He danced with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and was one of the (many) people looking for an apartment in The More the Merrier (1943).
Greene was in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Broadway Melody of 1938 and The Ice Follies of 1939. The AFI also asserts that Greene was brought in to direct the Virginia Reel performed during the dream sequence in Going Hollywood, presumably because it was not in Albertina Rasch’s wheelhouse.
British-born Margaret Bert (1896-1971) was not an especially prolific Hollywood character actor; fewer than 200 appearances in 35 years is nothing special. But she was a stalwart of the MGM musical, showing up without credit in thirty-one of them.
It is unclear when Bert emigrated to the United States, but her earliest-known credit is The Blackbird, a Tod Browning crime story with Lon Chaney. She was always uncredited and almost always in small, background parts, though she did have more to do as the heroine’s mother in Sarge Goes to College (1947) and its sequel, Campus Sleuth (1948).
Bert was frequently cast as nurses, flitting around while others did the acting, and this was the case in her first three MGM musicals, Stage Mother, Reckless and San Francisco. These were followed by Bitter Sweet, Little Nellie Kellie, Rio Rita, Music for Millions, Two Sisters from Boston, No Leave, No Love, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Unfinished Dance, Summer Holiday, Easter Parade, Luxury Liner, Words and Music, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Annie Get Your Gun, Summer Stock, Royal Wedding, Singin’ in the Rain, Skirts Ahoy, Because You’re Mine, Everything I Have is Yours, I Love Melvin, Give a Girl a Break, Easy to Love, Rose Marie, The Student Prince, Brigadoon, The Glass Slipper and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.
Bert continued acting on television until 1964.
Henry Branch Bell (1892-1950) had the nickname Handlebar, in reference to his ostentatious moustache.
Bell and his facial hair spent most of their time, from 1920 onwards, on the streets of the Old West, playing a variety of sheriffs, cowpokes and townsmen in literally hundreds of ‘B’ westerns.
His occasional forays into ‘A’ pictures included Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936, as an unemployed farmer), The Buccaneer (1938, as a pirate), They Died with their Boots On (1941) and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Bell was one of the patrons of the Opera House who was minded to ride the actor Granville around town on a rail.
Hank Bell can be seen (unmistakably) in three Metro musicals: Stage Mother, The Girl of the Golden West and Let Freedom Ring.
Harry James Holman (1862-1947) was a veteran vaudeville star, nationally known, according to his New York Times obituary, for his ‘hard-boiled Hampton’ skit. The sketch was preserved in Holman’s first short, Hard Boiled Hampton (1929), which was shot in New York City. (Some sources claim that he played a ‘fat man’ in The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1923.)
Holman retired from vaudeville and spent the last seventeen years of his life working as a character actor in Hollywood, averaging eight appearances a year. He worked with some of the major directors of the time, including parts in six Frank Capra pictures (he is the school principal who dives into the swimming pool in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). He was usually uncredited.
Harry Holman appeared in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and Broadway Melody of 1938. In the latter he was, quite fittingly, a resident of the theatrical boarding house.
Agnes Herring (1876-1939) was a veteran vaudeville and stage actor who made her first films at the age of 40, for New York City studios. Eventually moving to Hollywood, she appeared in over 120 pictures.
Herring occasionally had featured roles, such as the heroine’s mother in Harold Lloyd’s Among Those Present (1921), and Mrs Corney in Oliver Twist (1922). She played Violet Dana’s mother in Kosher Kitty Kelly (1926). Generally, however, she played without credit, specializing in (frequently Irish) mothers, cooks and landladies.
Herring only played in one MGM musical, as Kitty’s landlady in Stage Mother.
Charles Augustus Loudon Adams (1881-1959) was an Australian actor who was working on Broadway before moving to Hollywood when he was 50. His first appearance was uncredited, but then he played the butler in John Barrymore’s Topaze (1932).
This set the pattern for Adam’s career, with almost half of his fifty or so, largely uncredited, roles being as butlers. Many of the others were valets, secretaries, footmen and sundry servants.
In 1938, just for a change of pace, Adams played one of Richard the Lionheart’s retainers in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Adams played butlers in two MGM musicals, Stage Mother and Strike Up the Band.
Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Siodmak, Mitchel Leisen, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian: Scottish actor Elspeth Dudgeon (1871-1955) worked with some of Hollywood’s best directors in her twenty-four-year fil career.
She was a particular favourite of James Whale, who used her in six of his films. Most memorably–and whimsically–he cast her as the centenarian Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932), keeping her real sex a secret even from the rest of the cast, and crediting her as John Dudgeon.
In Sh! The Octopus (1937), Dudgeon played the Nanny whose before-your-eyes transformation into a cackling ‘hag’ was a masterpiece of in-camera special effects.
Dudgeon spent the last twenty or so years of her life in California, but had previously had a long career on the British stage. Whale’s Waterloo Bridge (1931) was her first, uncredited, screen role.
She made four appearances in MGM musicals, all of them without credit: Stage Mother, The Night is Young, Bathing Beauty and Till the Clouds Roll By.
British actor Nora Cecil (1878-1951) began her acting career on the London stage before moving to the United States and Broadway in her early twenties.
She made her screen debut in Maurice Tourneur’s Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915), and went on to appear in over 200 pictures. She worked for Tourneur again as one of Mary Pickford’s teachers in The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).
Cecil came into her own when she grew old enough to play prim or sour-faced ‘spinster types’, like the missionary in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932), Aunt Emily in John Ford’s Doctor Bull (1933) and the teacher in Nothing Sacred (1937). She was memorable in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) as the landlady who throws out Doc Boone.
In I Married a Witch (1942) she played Harriet Wooley, one of the nagging women who make miserable the lives of the cursed Wooley men.
In Cecil’s final film, Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), she played Louisa Ames, the malicious town gossip.
Nora Cecil was uncredited in six Metro musicals: Stage Mother, Going Hollywood, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Two Sisters from Boston and No Leave, No Love.
