The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Jane Keithley

    Jane Neave Keithley (1908-44) was a local beauty pageant winner who gave up university to have a go in Hollywood.

    After playing a chorus girl for Paramount, and then a small role in Metro’s The Florodora Girl, she changed her name to Jane Keith and secured the lead in Fox’s Jack London adaptation, The Sea Wolf.

    Unfortunately, this was a false dawn in her career, and she made only two further appearances. The silver lining, however, was her marriage to the director of The Sea Wolf, Alfred Santell. By all accounts a story relationship, it produced four children, which makes her untimely death at the age of 36 even sadder.  

  • Robert Bolder

    Robert Joseph Edney (1859-1937) was a British actor who relocated to America and made his first films for the Chicago-based Essanay Company.

    Bolder eventually took up residence in Los Angeles and, by the end of his career, had made around 120 pictures. He was a regular performer in Wallace Beery’s Sweedie series.

    Bolder played the Commodore, a stage doorman, in The Florordora Girl.

  • Sam Hardy

    Samuel B Hardy (1883-1935) abandoned his studies at Yale to go on the stage, later signing with the Biograph Company in its post-Griffith years to make pictures.

    Hardy had a preference for comedy, even though he played Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1918) for Famous Players-Lasky, and in The Miracle Woman (1931) he was the promoter who exploits Barbara Stanwyck’s religious fervour. His best-known role, however, was as the agent Weston in King Kong (1933).

    Hardy only appeared in one MGM musical, as the gambler Harry Fountaine in The Florordora Girl.

    Hardy was taken ill while shooting a film with his friend Eddie Cantor and did not survive emergency surgery.

  • Vivien Oakland

    Vivian Ruth Andersen (1895-1958) began performing in a vaudeville act with her sister, and later worked on Broadway. She made one film on the east coast in 1915, but her Hollywood career started in 1924.

    Oakland did a lot of work for the Hal Roach studio, and at different times played the wife of both Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel. She also played Edgar Kennedy’s wife in a series of shorts. Most of her pictures were shorts and programmers, though Oakland did have a small role in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).

    In The Florodora Girl, Oakland was Maud, in a double act with Ilka Chase as Marion Davies’s friends.

  • Tom Costello

    It was in the nature of classical Hollywood that an actor  could appear in 25 feature films, work with actors like James Cagney, Fred Astaire and Barbara Stanwyck, and under directors including Michael Curtiz, Frank Capra, Jacques Tourneur, Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk, yet almost never play a character with a name, let alone a credit.

    Such was the career of Tom Costello (1892-1954), who appeared briefly in In Gay Madrid.

  • Nicholas Caruso

    Canadian-born Nicholas Caruso Cosentino (1906-59) made appearances in three films between 1928 and 1932. The middle one was In Gay Madrid, as one of the students in the House of Troy.

  • Bruce Coleman

    It can be inferred that Bruce Coleman (1910-78) had issues with his weight from the fact proffered by IMDb that his nickname was Chubby. Moreover, in his debut film, In Gay Madrid, he played a character named Corpulento.

    Coleman only appeared in one other picture, and apparently spent most of his life in California. 

  • David Scott

    David Charles Scott (1911-83)was an actor who, aged 19, had a featured role as Ernesto in In Gay Madrid. He is known to have made two other features, released in 1935 and 1936.

    What Scott did for the remaining forty-seven years of his life is unknown.

  • Herbert Clark

    Herbert Clark (1904-63) was a Broadway actor who appeared in three films in 1929-30. One of these was In Gay Madrid, in which he played the student Octavio.

    Clark had the misfortune to become engaged in 1926, only to be informed by his father that his fiancée was, in fact, his half-sister. The vital information was initially provided in a telegram: “Katherine Clark is your sister. Am mailing letter containing full explanation”.

  • Nanci Price

    Irma Margaret Kobiela (1917-2005) worked in New York, and later in Hollywood, as a child actor. Her career lasted from 1922 to 1933.

    Price had the featured role of Jacinta, who is tied up and locked in a wardrobe (!) in In Gay Madrid.

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