The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Performers

  • Bobby Watson

    Robert Watson Knucher (1888-1965) started out in vaudeville as a teenager, and also toured the United States with a travelling medicine show. He moved up through appearing in shows at Coney Island, to a Broadway debut in 1918, where he continued to work.

    Watson made his first film in 1925 in That Royle Girl, a minor work by D W Griffith. He went on to appear, usually uncredited, in around ninety pictures, including: China Seas (1935), Captains Courageous (1937), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943, and one of nine pictures in which he played Adolf Hitler), The Big Clock (1948, and a rare credited role as one of the employees at Janoth Publications), A Foreign Affair (1948, and Hitler again) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962, his last film and playing Hitler).

    Bobby Watson acted in five MGM musicals, though he was credited only in the first, playing the press agent Thompson in Going Hollywood. The uncredited appearances were in Born to Dance, Singin’ in the Rain (as the diction coach in ‘Moses Supposes’), The Band Wagon and Deep in my Heart. 

  • Patsy Kelly

    Bridget Sarah Veronica Rose Kelly (1910-81) started out in show business as Frank Fay’s stooge in vaudeville before quickly moving on to Broadway shows, in which she performed alongside many of the top comedians of the day.

    Kelly’s earliest confirmed film appearance is the lead role in The Grand Dame (1931), a Vitaphone short shot in New York. Nineteen-thirty-three was an important year: she had an important supporting role in MGM’s musical Going Hollywood, playing Marion Davies’s best friend; and Hal Roach chose her to replace ZaSu Pitts as Thelma Todd’s partner in a series of comedy shorts. Pitts had played her usual scatty self, while Kelly was the ultimate wisecracking dame. 

    Throughout the 1930s, Kelly appeared as smart-mouthed support in comedies and musicals, including Every Night at Eight (1935) and Pigskin Parade (1936), and she was the female lead in the creepy comedy The Gorilla (1939), with Bela Lugosi and the Ritz Brothers.

    It is believed that Kelly’s career declined in the 1940s because of her insistence on living her life as an out lesbian. Returning to New York, she entertained the troops during the war, and performed on radio and in summer stock. She also worked as personal assistant to Tallulah Bankhead.

    Supporting work in films opened up to her again in the 1960s, and she also worked extensively on television. She made a successful return to Broadway in 1971 in a revival of No, No, Nanette, followed by another revival, Irene, in 1973.

    Patsy Kelly made one other musical at MGM,  starring in Nobody’s Baby.

  • Ned Sparks

    Canadian Edward Arthur Sparkman (1883-1957) made his film debut in silent pictures, a medium only partly suited to an actor whose unique presence relied on two attributes: yes, a deadpan face, but also, and most importantly, a monotone, nasal voice that seemed to deride everything around it.

    Sparks developed his unique style in one of the many Broadway productions in which he appeared after 1912. (His early life had been a gallimaufry of unlikely incidents, including gold prospecting and studying for the ministry.)

    After over thirty silent films, initially made in New York studios, Sparks made his talkie debut in The Big Noise(1928), an Allan Dwan production for First National. He went on to steal scenes in about fifty more pictures, including 42nd Street (1933), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Lady for a Day (1933), Imitation of Life (1934) and Magic Town (1947), his final appearance, made as a favour to James Stewart. It was his proud boast that he never smiled in any of them.

    Sparks was only in one MGM musical, Going Hollywood, where he began a lifelong friendship with Bing Crosby.

  • Stuart Erwin

    For fans of low-budget programmers, Stuart Erwin (1903-67) lives on as the first actor to play comic-strip boxer Joe Palooka on screen, in Palooka (1934).

    Erwin started acting at the University of California, and went on to work in Los Angeles stock theatre companies. He broke into films with a role in Mother Knows Best (1928), Fox’s first talking picture.

    He went on to make over 100 films, usually in credited supporting roles, but with a few leads. Even though he was the star of Pigskin Parade (1936), he was perversely nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category at the Academy Awards.

    Erwin’s films were generally not prestigious, and he was arguably more successful in radio and television.

    Stuart Erwin featured in just one MGM musical, playing the producer and financial backer of the film being made in Going Hollywood.

  • Fifi D’Orsay

    The first two screen appearances of Marie-Rose Angelina Yvonne Lussier (1904-83) were in They Had to See Paris and Hot for Paris (both 1929). Her characters also epitomized Parisian gaiety and ‘ooh-la-la’. But she was actually a French-Canadian who never went to France, or anywhere else outside North America, in her life.

    D’Orsay moved to New York as a young woman and found work in a revue by claiming to have experience at the Folies Bergère.She later took her surname from a brand of perfume. She worked in vaudeville until moving to Hollywood and achieving short-lived stardom until she foolishly walked out on a contract with Fox in 1936 and found it difficult to obtain work.

    She then returned to vaudeville, taking film roles when she could get them, and worked right through to the early seventies. In 1971, D’Orsay played Solange, an aging French chorus girl in the original Broadway production of Follies.

    One of D’Orsay’s best roles was as the awful Lili in MGM’s Going Hollywood. She made one other musical for the studio, playing Marcelle in the French-language version of The Merry Widow.

  • Bing Crosby

    Harry Lillis Crosby Jr (1903-77) was one of the most successful and influential singers in the world during the middle decades of the twentieth century. He was a prolific recording artist–at least 1600 songs, possibly nearer 2000–and a star of radio, television, concert hall and big screen.

    Crosby joined his first band–as a drummer–in 1923, and performed in various acts until being spotted by a member of the Paul Whiteman organization. He and his friend Miles Rinker were hired as singers and found themselves performing with one of the biggest bands in the country, with an international reputation. Out of this came the three-person Rhythm Boys, who appeared in the Universal musical revue King of Jazz (1930). 

    Crosby went solo in 1931 and, alongside the other strands of his career (including recording the best-selling single of all time), he became a film star, accumulating over 80 credits up to 1979. Most of his films were musicals, or comedies with music (for example, the Road pictures he made with Dorothy Lamour and Bob Hope). But he also took on straight roles, culminating in an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as a singing priest in Going My Way (1944).

    Bing Crosby made scores of musicals, but most of them were at his home studio, Paramount. He only made two for MGM, one at the beginning of his screen career and one late on. They were Going Hollywood and High Society.

  • Charles C Wilson

    Charles Cahill Wilson (1894-1948) was the type of stage actor with Broadway experience who was welcomed by Hollywood in 1929.

    He started out as dialogue director on Lucky Boy (1929), a George Jessel musical in which he also took a small role. He worked in that capacity on one further picture, in 1933, but otherwise restricted himself to acting., appearing in around 250 films in just seventeen years.

    Wilson was usually uncredited, but he did feature prominently in It Happened One Night (1934), playing Clark Gable’s irascible editor. This was one of several times he worked with Frank Capra; he played Charlie Dawson in Meet John Doe (1941).

    Wilson also played the DA in the first version of The Glass Key (1935) and was Jim Green in James Whale’s Show Boat (1936). In 1945 he made an appearance in the Fritz Lang masterpiece Scarlet Street, and the following year was uncredited in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

    Wilson acted without credit in four MGM musicals:  Dancing Lady, Reckless, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.

  • Charles Williams

    Charles Williams (1898-1958) is seen by millions every year in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), working away at the adding machine as the contributions pour in. But Williams appeared in well over 200 films in a career stretching from 1922 until 1956.

    Williams started out in the East Coast film business, working as a writer and actor. He moved to Hollywood with the advent of sound, and worked as a busy character actor. Most of his appearances were uncredited, and notable pictures included The Thin Man (1934), Dames (1934), History is Made at Night (1937), A Star is Born (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), Roxie Hart (1942) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

    Williams was in two MGM musicals, Dancing Lady and Ice Follies of 1939. 

  • Charles Sullivan

    Charles Sullivan (1899-1972) was a ubiquitous character actor in American films between 1925 and 1966, accumulating around 550 appearances on the big screen.

    Notable appearances include King Kong (1933, where he was also Robert Armstrong’s stunt double), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Glass Key (1942), State of the Union (1948) and The Last Hurrah (1958).

    Sullivan can be seen, uncredited, in fourteen MGM musicals: Dancing Lady, Student Tour, San Francisco, Sweethearts, At the Circus, Born to Sing, Swing Fever, Music for Millions, Easy to Wed, Living in a Big Way, Big City, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Rose Marie and It’s Always Fair Weather. 

  • Pat Somerset

    Patrick Holme-Sumner (1897-1974) was a stage actor who starred in British films during the late 1910s, including a series about the adventures of a couple called Adam and Eve.

    After travelling to the USA to work on Broadway, Somerset ended up in Hollywood, where he was generally restricted to uncredited roles. He became a member of John Ford’s stock company, appearing in nine of the director’s films, including The Informer (1935) and Mary of Scotland (1936).

    Somerset also worked with Rouben Mamoulian (Becky Sharp [1935]), Clarence Brown (Anna Karenina [1935]), George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett [1935]) and Frank Capra (Mr Deeds Goes to Town [1936]).

    Pat Somerset appeared in three Metro musicals: Dancing Lady, Maytime and The Firefly.

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