The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Bit Players

  • Alphonse Martell

    French-born Alphonse Martell (1890-1976) had a forty-year career as a character actor in Hollywood, making over 250 films and many television appearances.

    In 1933, Martell became a Poverty Row auteur when he wrote and directed Tarnished Youth (also known as Gigolettes of Paris). 

    Martell played a variety of parts, but his speciality was waiters, in which role he made at least 80 appearances, as well as cropping up many times as a maitre d’. 

    Alphonse acted in twelve Metro musicals across three decades. A Lady’s Morals was followed by Student Tour, A Night at the Opera, Everybody Sing, Broadway Melody of 1940, I Married an Angel, Bathing Beauty, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Rich, Young and Pretty, Show Boat, Lovely To Look At and I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

  • Agostino Borgato

    Agostino Borgato (1871-1939) was a theatre actor in Italy and the UK prior to emigrating to America in 1925. He had also appeared in a number of Italian films from 1910 onwards, and directed five in the period 1918-21.

    Borgato made his American screen debut in 1925, eventually appearing in around sixty films. After the introduction of sound, he played a variety of foreigners, though obviously with an emphasis on Italians. He was also cast in foreign-language versions of Hollywood films.

    Borgato acted in seven MGM musicals: A Lady’s Morals, The Cuban Love Song, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Maytime, The Firefly and Swiss Miss.

  • Nathalie Visart

    The film career of Natalie Visart (1910-86) is inextricably linked to Cecil B DeMille. She was a friend of his daughter Katharine, joining her in uncredited revelry in the zeppelin in Madam Satan.

    Visart later began a relationship with the future director Mitchell Leisen, who designed costumes for DeMille’s films, working with him on The Sign of the Cross (1932). He secured for her the role of costume designer on The Plainsman (1936), and she went on to carry out that function on five more of DeMille’s pictures. She also worked for Frank Capra, designing for Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Meet John Doe (1941).

    Visart’s work was highly-respected, but she gave up her career after marrying in 1946.

  • Kasha Haroldi

    Kasha Haroldi (1907-92) was an actor who arguably received the most publicity for being, for a few years, the sister-in-law of Joan Crawford.

    Haroldi made her first appearance on screen in 1923 and the last in 1938. With the possible exception of Wesley Ruggles’s version of The Age of Innocence (1924), the only film she was associated with to feature in the history books is Madam Satan, in which, like so many others, she played one of the wives of Henry VIII.

  • Elvira Lucianti

    Like Natalie Storm, Elvira Lucianti (dates unknown) is a mysterious figure who walked onto the zeppelin as one of Henry VIII’s wives in Madam Satan.

  • Mary McAllister

    Mary McAlister [sic] (1908-91) was ‘Little Mary McAlister’, one of America’s first child stars.

    She made her first appearance in 1915 for Essanay, and starred in Sadie Goes to Heaven (1917) two years later.

    McAllister worked regularly up until 1928, when talking pictures slowed down her adult career. She retired following an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan.

  • June Nash

    June Nash (1911-79) had a very brief film career, comprising nine appearances.

    The high point was playing the female lead in Strange Cargo (1929).

    The low point may have been an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan.

  • Natalie Storm

    Someone called Natalie Storm (1905-??), apparently born in Durban, South Africa, may have been in Hollywood during 1930 and appeared as one of Henry VIII’s wives in Madam Satan.

  • Henry Stockbridge

    Henry Stockbridge (1871-1952) was an actor who made his screen debut, in his late fifties, as one of the wise fools in Cecil B DeMille’s Dynamite (1929). The following years he was the uncredited Butterfly Man in DeMille’s Madam Satan.

    Stockbridge only appeared in half a dozen films culminating with Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), playing one of the unemployed farmers. 

  • Ella Hall

    Ella August Hall (1897-1981) came from an acting family, and performed on the stage at an early age. She joined the Biograph Company in 1912, worked for Griffith and Sennett, then played the lead in Lois Weber’s Memories (1913). In total, Hall appeared in nearly 100 films.

    Hall worked busily until early 1918, when she took a break following the birth of her first child. She made only a handful of films in the 1920s, and made an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan. 

    Hall’s final film, without credit, was Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932).  

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