Category: Performers

Maureen O’Sullivan

Maureen Paula O’Sullivan (1911-98) is immortal, to those in the know, as Jane to Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan in the earliest and best of MGM’s series. She is also known, less excitingly, as Mia Farrow’s mother.

Like the wild colonial boy, O’Sullivan was born and raised in Ireland. Shortly after leaving school, she was spotted in Dublin by Frank Borzage, who was there shooting footage for Song O’ My Heart (1930). He cast her in a substantial role.

She moved to Hollywood to complete the picture, and made further films for Fox, including the bizarre sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine (1930), before signing with MGM in 1932. By the time she retired in 1994, she had notched up about seventy film credits, plus considerable work on television.

In addition to six Tarzan films, O’Sullivan had featured roles in The Thin Man (1934), The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), David Copperfield (1935, as Dora), Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Big Clock (1943, directed by her husband, John Farrow) and The Tall T (1957). Late in life she acted in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, playing the mother of her daughter Mia).

O’Sullivan appeared in two MGM musicals: Stage Mother and A Day at the Races.

August 23, 2026

Stage Mother

The Cast

Alice Brady	Kitty Lorraine
Maureen O’Sullivan	Shirley Lorraine
Franchot Tone	Warren Foster
Phillips Holmes	Lord Aylesworth
Ted Healy	Ralph Martin
Russell Hardie	Fred Lorraine
C. Henry Gordon	Ricco
Alan Edwards	Al Dexter
Ben Alexander	Francis Nolan
Sam Ash	Mr. Mark Thorne (uncredited)
Ruth Gillette	Blonde friend (uncredited)
Jay Eaton	Mr. Sterling (uncredited)
Phillips Smalley	Music Store Manager (uncredited)
Nora Cecil	Miss Gilford (uncredited)
Elspeth Dudgeon	Music Store Customer (uncredited)
Larry Fine	Music Store Customer (uncredited)
Lowden Adams	Dexter’s butler (uncredited)
Aggie Herring	Landlady (uncredited)
Harry Holman	Mr. Rumley (uncredited)
Lillian Harmer	Mrs Lorraine (uncredited)
Tom Ricketts	Mr Lorraine (uncredited)
Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer	Irish Eyes’ singer (uncredited)
Mary Ann Jackson	Auditioning Child singer/dancer (uncredited)
Hank Bell	Mustached Man With Badge (uncredited)
Margaret Bert	Nurse (uncredited)
Harrison Greene	Stage Manager (uncredited)
Shirley Jean Rickert	Shirley Lorraine as a child (uncredited)
Margaret Jones	Student (uncredited)
John Elliott	Politician (uncredited)
Luis Alberni	Hors D’Oeuvres Waiter (uncredited)
Bud Geary	Orderly (uncredited)
Lew Kelly	Jake, a stagehand (uncredited)
June Gittelson	Laughing Woman (uncredited)
Gladden James	Audience Member (uncredited)
Tiny Jones	Stage mother (uncredited)
Alice Lake	Audience member (uncredited)
John Larkin	Porter (uncredited)
Buddy Messinger	Fellow in Third Row (uncredited)
Greta Meyer	Stage mother (uncredited)
Bert Moorhouse	Navy Officer (uncredited)
Billy O’Brien	Student (uncredited)
Frank O’Connor	Man at gangplank (uncredited)
Garry Owen	Jerry, a stagehand (uncredited)
Bradley Page	Tom Banton (uncredited)
Leo White	Percy, the audition manager (uncredited)
Henry Roquemore	Messenger (uncredited)
Larry Steers	Dexter’s party guest (uncredited)
Carl Stockdale	Stagehand (uncredited)
Guy Usher	Theater Owner (uncredited)
Monte Vandergrift	Stage Lighting Man (uncredited)
Glen Walters	Dancing Girl’s mother (uncredited)
Beal Wong	Stage extra (uncredited)
Tammany Young	Taxi Driver (uncredited)
Edmund Mortimer	Shipboard extra (uncredited)
Bill Elliott	Dexter’s party guest (uncredited)
Art Jarrett	Dubbing for Sam Ash (uncredited)

August 22, 2026

Weber & Fields

Joseph Morris Weber (1867-1942) and Moses Schoenfeld (1867-1941) were a highly influential comedy duo at the turn of the twentieth century, in both vaudeville and musical theatre. They were best known for a ‘Dutch’ dialect act, in which they played German immigrants torturing the English language. Both performers were themselves the children of Polish immigrants.

Weber and Fields also became impresarios, staging shows that centred on their own act, while also putting together road shows that toured the country.

Joe Weber and Lew Fields were amongst the old vaudeville acts that filmed material for the abandoned MGM musical The March of Time. Part of their sequence can be seen at the beginning of Broadway to Hollywood, although, given they are in a horse costume, there is no way of actually verifying it is them. Both men would have been in their seventies at the time. Joe Weber also appears briefly as a character in Broadway to Hollywood, played by Leo White.

August 17, 2026
Eddie Foster

Edward Eleck Foster (1906-89) had a fairly anonymous thirty-six-year career, but worked with some of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers.

Sullivan started at the top in 1926, performing in Buster Keaton’s The General. Later, he appeared in Howard Hawks’s The Road to Glory (1936), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941, and Frank Borzage’s Strange Cargo (1940).

He was in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943) and Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). He played a slave in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and one of his last films was Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961).

Along the way, Sullivan appeared without credit (as was normally the case) in Metro’s Broadway to Hollywood.

August 15, 2026
Billy Sullivan

William Arthur Sullivan (1891-1946) was a hard-working character who made around ninety films, none of which have attracted a great deal of attention from film historians. His best-known film may well be MGM’s musical Broadway to Hollywood, even though it is unclear what role he actually played.

Sullivan would have been 23 when he made his debut in the serial Million Dollar Mystery (1914). He bowed out with the Raoul Walsh picture Big Brown Eyes (1936), in the auspicious company of Cary Grant and Joan Bennett.

August 15, 2026
Forrest Taylor

Edwin Forrest Taylor (1883-1965) had already acted on the stage and made over two dozen films when America’s belated involvement in the First World War interrupted his career.

He returned to the stage after military service, for a time leading his own company. Screen work began again in 1926, and by the time he retired, shortly before his death, he had appeared in well over 400 films and television episodes.

Taylor was a character actor, mainly in uncredited parts, including in a couple of hundred ‘B’ westerns. He occasionally showed up in more prestigious pictures, including Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Wilson (1944), The Sea of Grass (1947) and Rancho Notorious (1952).

Despite all those appearances, Taylor was only ine one Metro musical, as a film director in Broadway to Hollywood.

August 14, 2026
Bobby Somers

Robert David Somers (1932-1982) made his screen debut aged seven months, playing Eddie Quillan as a baby in the MGM musical Broadway to Hollywood.

Some sources suggest that Somers also appeared with the Little Rascals, though it is unclear whether or not this is accurate. His adult career in the cinema began in 1953 when he worked as both actor and stunt performer on The War of the Worlds. Stunt work in film and television constituted the major part of his work over the next twenty years. Most of his work would appear to be uncredited and, in many cases, unrecorded.

August 14, 2026
Tom Nawn

Thomas Joseph Nawn (1863-1949) was a Scottish-born vaudevillian who specialized for many years in playing comic Irishmen. He and his wife Hettie toured the world with the Tom Nawn Polite Vaudeville Company, an iteration of which makes an appearance in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.

Nawn was in a few silent comedy pictures, most notably Buster Keaton’s masterpiece The General (1926).

August 13, 2026
Rice & Cady

Charles Rice (dates unknown) and Fred Cady (dates unknown) were vaudeville and burlesque performers who established a long-running partnership in 1900. They also worked in musical theatre, including touring productions of the Weber-Fields comedy Fiddle Dee Dee.

They appeared separately in a handful of films, and were seen together in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.

August 13, 2026
Una Merkel

Joan Bennett, Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow, Eleanor Powell, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Powell: just a few of the stars who had the delightful Una Merkel (1903-86) as a best friend during Hollywood’s Golden Age. With an unmistakeable Kentucky twang, Merkel was rarely the star of her pictures, but was also rarely unmemorable in them.

Aged 17, Merkel worked as a stand-in for Lillian Gish on Way Down East (1920), which means it is sometimes her you see in the famous ice floe sequence. After plying the acting trade in the legitimate theatre and in vaudeville, she worked for D W Griffith again when he cast her as Ann Rutledge in Abraham Lincoln (1930).

A hard-working supporting player, Merkel appeared in forty pictures released in the five-year period 1930 to 1934, perhaps most famously partnered with Ginger Rogers in the ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ number in 42nd Street (1933).

Una Merkel’s most famous scene is unquestionably her fight with Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939). Both actors eschewed stunt doubles and ended up heavily bruised, as well as soaking wet from James Stewart’s bucket of water.

In the 1950s, Merkel was a successful and Tony award-winning stage actor, and was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for Summer and Smoke (1961).

Merkel’s nine MGM musicals took her from Alice Brady in 1933 (Broadway to Hollywood) to Elvis Presley in 1966 (Spinout). In between came The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1936, Born to Dance, Rich Young and Pretty, The Merry Widow (again) and I Love Melvin.

August 13, 2026