Mildred Lucile Dixon (1910-85) was in many a chorus line on screen, and often stood out owing to her distinctive bobbed hair.
Always uncredited, Dixon was in some substantial pictures, including 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Duck Soup (all 1933).
She was in a couple of dozen films, including Metro’s Flying High.
Mary Ella Dees (1911-2004) is perhaps best known for her most macabre job. Jean Harlow, who had befriended Dees after she played a bit in Red-Headed Woman (1932), died in 1937 during the production of Saratoga. Dees was hired to stand in for Harlow, in floppy hats and viewed obscurely, during the few scenes that remained to be shot.
Mary Dees was uncredited in about 22 films all told, including two MGM musicals, Flying High and Born to Dance, playing a chorus girl in both. Her film career ended in 1946, but she continued to act on the stage well into her seventies.
Dees’s obituary quotes her channeling Norma Desmond: “We were stars. Today actors look like any other jerk on the street”. Calling herself a star might be stretching it, but she’s otherwise not wrong.
Nicholas W Copeland (1894-1940) died aged 45, but still managed to notch up well over 100 screen appearances in a career lasting just twelve years.
Copeland made a short at Fox in 1928, and followed this with his first feature, playing a henchman, at Warner Bros. He was usually uncredited, but showed up in some top-class pictures, including Twentieth Century and The Thin Man (both 1934), Theodora Goes Wild (1936), You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Copeland played parts in five MGM musicals. Flying High was followed by Student Tour, Reckless, Swiss Miss and New Moon (his final film).
He had served in the First World War and was buried with military honours.
Tommy Conlon (1917-2000) made the first screen appearance of his short career, at the age of 14, in MGM’s Flying High.
Conlon went on to make about a dozen films, with a prominent role in DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932). His final role was also for DeMille, uncredited in Reap the Wild Wind (1942).
Edwina G Callahan (1912-2007) was, unlike many of her contemporaries in studio chorus lines, a dancer with training. She had begun dancing professionally while still in high school and was working regularly on the stage by her late teens.
Callahan made her screen debut, aged 18, in Fox’s weird and wonderful Just Imagine (1930), and made an appearance the following year in MGM’s Flying High.
Callahan’s film career was over by 1937, but she had by then been in four more Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, The Great Ziegfeld, Born to Dance and Rosalie (her final film).
In the 1930s, Callahan was briefly married to cinematographer Gregg Toland.
Like many other young women of her time, the show business ambitions of Mary Ashcraft (1905-79) ended up with a few appearances as chorus girls and the like.
One of those appearances was in Metro’s Flying High.
In 1927, there were press reports that Ashcraft had been saved from drowning on the set of Swim, Girl, Swim by renowned swimmer Gertrude Ederle, who was starring in the picture. It may be true, but the story reeks of the studio publicity machine.
Loretta (possibly Lorena) Andrews (1911-2004)was a long-lived actor whose Hollywood career was quite short. She made her debut in Palmy Days (1931), and by 1936 had appeared in 29 pictures, mostly musicals, mostly in uncredited roles as chorus girls and models.
Andrews’s greatest distinction was probably being present in four classic Warner Bros musicals with dance direction by Busby Berkeley: 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Dames. She had earlier worked under Berkeley on MGM’s Flying High. Andrews also appeared in The Great Ziegfeld.
Andrews is described as a “former film actress” in a press report about a court case concerning the estate of her late husband.
IMDb suggests Andrews made a one-film comeback in 1941 in a Judy Canova comedy.
Hattie McDaniel famously said “I’d rather play a maid than be one”. The actor Charles Randolph Moore could have said much the same about being a railway porter. He played the role at least 38 times, in well over one-third of his total appearances. He also played more than his fair share of lift operators.
Moore worked for some of Hollywood’s top directors, including William A Wellman, Josef von Sternberg, Victor Fleming, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and William Wyler. He was a member of Preston Sturges’s stock company, and acted in six of his pictures. In Sullivan’s Travels (1941), he was the cook who was shaken to pieces in the speeding land yacht.
In all three of Moore’s MGM musicals–The Prodigal, Reckless and Two Girls on Broadway–Moore played a porter.
Julius D Cowles (1877-1943) was aYale-educated, experienced Shakespearean actor who made his film debut in 1914. He was also an accomplished writer.
Cowles played supporting roles throughout the 1920s, including Zambo (in blackface) in The Lost World and Yankee Joe in Lord Jim (both 1925). He was predominantly associated with ‘heavy’ roles; one newspaper headline ran “A Mean Looker But Really He’s A Perfect Gent”.
In the 1930s, the importance of Cowles’s parts diminished and he was more frequently uncredited. He turned up, without credit, in four MGM musicals: The Prodigal, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Hullabaloo and I Dood It.
Hedwig [sic] Reicher (1884-1971) was a German actor who made her Broadway debut in 1909. Two years later she played Ellida in the American premiere of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888).
Reicher did not make her first screen appearance until 1925, and only ever had small roles in about twenty films. Her most prominent part was playing Janet Gaynor’s mother in Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929).
The following year, she had a bit part in New Moon.
In 1913, Reicher played Columbia, the personification of the United States, in the allegorical tableau featured in the Woman Suffrage Procession held in Washington DC.
