Seymour Kupper (1915-34) made an appearance as a child actor in The Jazz Singer (1927), but his career was over a couple of years later. His last film was an uncredited role in Marianne. He would appear to have suffered a tragically-early death.
Category: Performers
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Seymour Kupper
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Emile Chautard
Émile Chautard (1864-1934) was forty-four when he made his first screen appearance in 1910, following a successful stage career. He directed his first film in the same year, and was appointed head of production at Paris’s Éclair Films in 1913. Between 1910 and 1924, Chautard directed over 100 films, but stopped acting in 1917. During a period at the World Film Company in 1915, he trained an apprentice cutter named Josef Von Sternberg.
Chautard took a job with Famous Player-Lasky in around 1922, but only directed a handful of films in America. He returned to acting, making around over sixty appearances. Notable films included 7th Heaven (1927) and three by his former protegé, Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus (both 1932). In the last of these, Von Sternberg cast him as a nightclub manager named Chautard. He was also in the French-language versions of several pictures.
Chautard was in Marianne and Free and Easy. He was uncredited in the latter, which was increasingly the case during the final years of his career.
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Robert Edeson
Robert Edeson (1868-1931) was an actor on Broadway and a vaudeville performer before making his film debut in 1914, starring in Cecil B DeMille’s The Call of the North. He had played his role in the original stage production.
Edeson continued to play leading roles throughout the silent era, including as Colonel Zapt in Rex Ingram’s 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. He also created the first screen version of lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1927).
Edeson acquired his most unusual assignment when actor Rudolph Christians died before Erich Von Stroheim had completed Foolish Wives (1922). Edeson took over as the character, but always acting with his back to the camera.
Robert Edeson’s only involvement in MGM musicals was as the General in Marianne.
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Scott Kolk
Walter Scott Kolk (1905-93) was a professional drummer before becoming an actor, and also sang in revues.
Kolk made his film debut in Marianne, and the following year experienced the harsher side of the First World War when he played one of the volunteers in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Shortly before finally retiring from acting (he had taken several years out in the early thirties), Kolk portrayed the eponymous hero on the 12-part serial Secret Agent X-9 (1937), based on a comic strip co-written by Dashiell Hammett.
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Georgia Woodruff
Georgia Rodgers Woodruff (1906-81) was a Memphis-based pianist who was cast to be the lead soprano for the Dixie Jubilee Singers in Hallelujah. She became a close friend of Eva Jessye, who also appeared in the film. Jessye had been assigned by King Vidor to find a soprano, and was told she would find what she wanted at Memphis’s Central Baptist Church.
Woodruff had previously been working with the celebrated gospel songwriter Lucie Campbell. After making Hallelujah, she returned to playing in her church, and eventually became a teacher.
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Blue Washington
Edgar Hughes Washington (1898-1970) was a junior boxer, then a pitcher and first baseman in the Negro baseball leagues, mostly known for playing in Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri. His nickname, Blue, was apparently given him by Frank Capra when they were children.
Washington began a parallel acting career in 1919, and had accumulated nearly 90 appearances by the time of his last film, The Hustler (1961). He was usually uncredited, and this was the case when he played a member of the congregation in Hallelujah.
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Arvert Potts
Arvert Potts (1923-2005) was one of the four Potts brothers who played children in films of the 1920s and 30s.
Arvert was the oldest, and made his first film aged 3, Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927). His connection with MGM musicals is an appearance in Hallelujah.
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William Allen Garrison
William Allen Garrison (dates unknown) played a heavy in Hallelujah. As with a number of Black performers in early Hollywood pictures, no other information seems available.
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Eddie Conners
Eddie Conners (dates unknown) is listed in most sources as a singer who appeared in Hallelujah, but no further information is available.
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Evelyn Pope Burwell
Evelyn Pope Burwell (1904-74) graduated with a degree in music from New York University, which had been one of the first American universities to admit Black students. After graduation, she worked in the chorus line at the Cotton Club, and was pianist and tutor for the dancing Berry Brothers.
Burwell first joined the cast of Hallelujah as one of the Dixie Jubilee Singers, but was singled out by King Vidor, who nicknamed her ‘Hot Shot’.
She only made a couple of other uncredited film appearances.
