Irene Lucille Marguerite Franklin (1885-1941) was reputedly carried on stage by her parents when she was six months old. Aged six, she appeared in a Broadway production, paving the way for a career in vaudeville, following a spell in British music halls in 1894.
By the 1920s, Franklin was back again on Broadway, both as a performer and songwriter.
In 1929, Franklin was invited to commit part of her vaudeville routine to celluloid in a Vitaphone short. Four years later she acted in the first of around thirty feature films, her roles both credited and uncredited. The lower-status the picture, the more likely she was to have a named character and a credit. Her final screen role was in Fixer Dugan, made for RKO in 1939.
Franklin appeared in just one MGM musical, as the drunken opera singer Lotte Lengel in The Cat and the Fiddle.
Joseph Bridger Cawthorn (1868-1949) had a long and varied career long before he went anywhere near a film set.
Born into a show business family, he made his stage debut aged three. Later, he worked in minstrel shows and vaudeville, frequently as a dialect comedian (in his case, German). He also crossed the Atlantic and worked for a time in British music halls.
Cawthorn first appeared on Broadway in around 1897/8, with his first confirmed appearance in The Fortune Teller (1898). He sustained a Broadway career for over twenty years, starring in a variety of productions.
Cawthorn moved to Hollywood in 1927 and played Olive Borden’s father in The Secret Studio, the first of around 55 screen appearances. Notable roles included Dr Armand de Fontinac in Love Me Tonight, where his experience in operettas came in useful for a duet with Jeanette MacDonald.
Joseph Cawthorn had featured roles in three MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Naughty Marietta (reunited with MacDonald as her former music teacher) and The Great Ziegfeld (as the protagonist’s father).
Adrienne Dumontier (1878-1957) had a successful career on the French stage prior to the First World War, working at the Comédie-Française. She emigrated to the United States after the war, and by 1922 was active on Broadway.
D’Ambricourt made a few silent films at New York studios, but travelled to Hollywood, along with many others, in 1929, starting out with a featured role in The Trial of Mary Dugan (1929). She went on to play French character roles, often uncredited, in around seventy pictures. These included Design for Living (1933), Peter Ibbetson (1935), History is Made at Night (1937), The Song of Bernadette (1943) and To Have and Have Not (1944).
During the early 1930s, D’Ambricourt also featured prominently in French-language versions of pictures, including MGM’s A Lady’s Morals, released in France with the more sensible title of Jenny Lind.
D’Ambricourt acted in seven Metro musicals, across a 25-year period. She was credited as the concierge in The Cat and the Fiddle, then uncredited in The Merry Widow, The Great Ziegfeld, San Francisco, Two Girls on Broadway, Million Dollar Mermaid and Les Girls, her final film.
Adrienne D’Ambricourt also terrified generations of French children as the voice of the wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
Frank Meinberg Conroy (1890-1964) acted on the British stage before emigrating to the United States in 1915. He became active in the New York theatre, and by 1917 was leading his own company at the newly-built Greenwich Village Theatre.
Conroy appeared on Broadway in over forty productions, while maintaining a parallel career on screen, with around eighty feature films to his credit. His first picture, the aptly-titled Royal Family of Broadway (1930), was made in New York, but by 1931 he was travelling regularly to Hollywood.
Conroy played the concierge Rohna in Grand Hotel (1932), was John Blake, the prospector’s son, in Call of the Wild (1935). But his most memorable screen role was in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), playing Major Tetley, the leader of the lynch mob.
Frank Conroy appeared in one Metro musical, as the theatre owner in The Cat and the Fiddle.
Vivienne Sonia Segal (1897-1992) was a hugely successful theatrical star in musical comedies and operettas who never succeeded in a Hollywood career (perhaps because she did not really want one).
Segal made her first appearance on Broadway in 1915, when she was eighteen, and her final one in 1952, in a revival of Pal Joey. She had been in the original production in 1940, and debuted the song ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’.
Segal’s Broadway career was wide-ranging. She starred with W C Fields in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1924 and 1925, and was also in The Desert Song in 1926.
In Hollywood, Segal starred in four pictures at Warner Bros in the 1930 musical frenzy, and that was pretty much it. Apart from a supporting role in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and a couple of shorts, she restricted herself to the stage (apart from a handful of television appearances) until retiring in 1966.
Jean Pierre Carl Buron (1886-1956) was born in Denmark to a French father and Danish mother. He is known to have appeared in three short Danish films in 1906, amongst the country’s earliest cinematic works. After struggling to find acting work, he emigrated to America in 1913.
Hersholt worked steadily throughout the silent era in features and shorts, and including an uncredited role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). His career moved up a level when he was cast by Erich von Stroheim as the second lead in Greed (1924), the great film maudit of the 1920s. As the duplicitous Marcus, Hersholt was at the centre of the gruelling shoot in Death Valley, where the cameras had to be wrapped in iced towels to prevent them from warping. He reportedly lost 27 pounds and ended up in hospital.
The rest of Hersholt’s career was spent as a reliable supporting actor,often in character parts, in over 130 features. He was particularly effective as the cruel uncle victimizing Greta Garbo in Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931), and played opposite Shirley Temple, much more benevolently, in Heidi (1937).
During the late thirties, he played kindly Dr Christian in a radio series, and went on to recreate the character in a number of pictures and on television.
Hersholt only appeared in one MGM musical, aged up to play Professor Bertier in The Cat and the Fiddle.
Jean Hersholt’s name crops up most frequently today in relation to the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, presented by the American Academy to individuals whose actions have “brought credit to the industry”, Recent recipients have included Michael J Fox (2023) and Dolly Parton (2026).
The award was established to honour Hersholt’s own role in establishing the Motion Picture Relief Fund, money from which was used to set up the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, where many actor have spent their final years.
Charles Edward Butterworth (1896-1946) was one of those Hollywood character actors with a very defined onscreen persona which he carried with him from picture to picture: mild-mannered, courteous and hesitant/confused.
After starting out as a journalist, Butterworth dabbled in writing humorous pieces, which ended with him performing comic monologues in vaudeville. This led, in turn, to Broadway shows.
In 1929, Butterworth performed a monologue in a Paramount short called Vital Subjects, and followed this with 47 appearances in feature films, almost always credited. He was top-billed in a handful of pictures, for example Baby Face Harrington (1935), but was usually cast in a strong supporting role.
Butterworth played the Comte de Savignac in Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) and was Algy Longworth in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934). He provided comic relief in Magnificent Obsession (1935) and was the Duke of Ephesus in the, not wholly successful, screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse (1940). Butterworth was an adept ad libber, and often improvised better dialogue than had been written for him.
Charles Butterworth featured in five MGM musicals of the 1930s: The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party, Student Tour, The Night is Young and Let Freedom Ring.
Butterworth died aged 49, when his car ran off the road in an unexplained accident.
Jeanette Anna MacDonald (1903-65) was unquestionably MGM’s most popular musical star of the 1930s. She made sixteen pictures in fourteen years, eight of them opposite Nelson Eddy. Her films were mainly operettas, with a few notable exceptions. Unlike Eddy, she was a capable actor, with a particular skill at comedy.
MacDonald had made her professional stage debut in 1920. Working steadily, she obtained her first starring role on Broadway in 1927. She was spotted by Ernst Lubitsch, who took her to Hollywood to star in his first sound picture, The Love Parade (1929). (She was first, presumably to give her some on-set experience, uncredited in Say It with Songs [1929]).
She made seven films released in 1930, some good (Monte Carlo [1930], again with Lubitsch), some bad (the execrable The Lottery Bride [(1930]).
MacDonald had a quieter year in 1932 (like every other musical performer in Hollywood), but made two outstanding pictures, Lubitsch’s One Hour With You (1932) and Love Me Tonight (1932), directed by Rouben Mamoulian. She then signed her contract with MGM.
The sixteen Metro musicals were: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow (her final film with Lubitsch), Naughty Marietta (teaming for the first time with Eddy), Rose-Marie, San Francisco (very much a change of pace), Maytime, The Firefly, The Girl of the Golden West, Sweethearts, Broadway Serenade, New Moon, Bitter Sweet, Smilin’ Through, I Married an Angel, Cairo and Three Daring Daughters.
In the last of these, she played a divorcée with children, and her career as a film star was effectively over. She sings a few songs in The Sun Comes Up (1949), but this is a Lassie film, not a musical.
MacDonald was also by now suffering from the heart condition that ended her life so early. She spent her final decade and a half performing in concerts, stage musicals, opera and on the radio.
Ettore Vittorio Sarno (1880-1953) was an Italian-born actor known to have worked for New York-based film companies from around 1912. His first feature film is thought to have been Under the Gaslight (1914).
Sarno appeared in at least 200 features and shorts, mostly credited roles during the sound era, but more often uncredited after 1929, when he was largely restricted to ‘ethnic’ parts. He can be seen in King of Kings (1927), Lucky Star (1929), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Cloak and Dagger (1946) and The Egg and I (1947).
Sarno was a Mexican waiter in MGM’s Going Hollywood and the Gypsy leader at the beginning of Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow. IMDb also suggests he appeared in Balalaika, which seems likely given its setting.
