Lodovico Tomarchio (1886-1947) was an Italian operatic tenor who made his professional debut in 1910. He made his first stage appearances in the United States in 1923, and had settled there by 1931.
Retired from the stage, Tomarchio began teaching, and became involved with the Paris Inn, a bohemian nightclub with singing waiters, all of whom were former professional singers. As well as supervising them, he also performed in the venue himself.
Tomarchio made appearances in eight films during the 1930s, including four MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, A Night at the Opera, Maytime and Swiss Miss (in which he was credited). He can also be glimpsed in archive footage in a montage sequence in Lady Be Good.
Christian Franz Bruno Julius Maria Rub (1886-1956) was allegedly an admirer of his fellow Austrian, Adolf Hitler. This is according to those who worked with him on his most enduring contribution to cinema, as the voice and physical model for Gepetto in Pinocchio (1940).
Rub started out as a stage actor in Germany, working in provincial theatre. It is unclear when he relocated to the United States, but his first film there, The Belle of New York, was made in 1919. This was the first of more than 100 film roles, most of them during the sound era.
Rub was a jobbing character actor, accepting both credited and uncredited parts in pictures, including Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now (1934), Peter Ibbetson (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Captains Courageous (1937) and, perhaps fittingly, Nazi Agent (1942).
Christian Rub appeared uncredited in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle, The Night is Young and Maytime, and was credited as the coachman in The Great Waltz.
The dates of Joseph Henry Kolker are either 1870-1947 or 1874-1947 (definitely not, as he claimed himself, 1884). He was born either in Germany or Massachusetts.
What we do know is that he was a professional actor by 1895, and worked extensively on Broadway from 1904. By 1914, he was both acting in and directing moving pictures in New York. He directed eighteen films in total, and wrote one of them, The Third Generation (1920).
In a thirty-three year film career (including a six-year break from 1919), Koler appeared in over 160 features, usually in credited character roles.
In Baby Face (1933), Kolker was a banker seduced by Barbara Stanwyck in her ascent to the top. He played the family doctor in Imitation of Life (1934), and was Melvyn Douglas’s controlling father in Theodora Goes Wild (1936). As Friar Laurence, he provided the sleeping potion to Norma Shearer’s Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1937), and he played the crooked politician in DeMille’s Union Pacific (1939).
Kolker’s final appearances were in Edgar G Ulmer’s Bluebeard (1944) and, after a break, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947).
Henry Kolker was in four MGM musicals: uncredited in The Cat and the Fiddle and Reckless, and credited in Here Comes the Band and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
Leonid Nikolaevich Kinskii (1903-98) started out working as a theatrical mime in Czarist Russia. He left the country in 1921 and acted on stage in various countries until arriving in the United States in 1924.
After further stage work, and working on a film in 1926 where he did not make the final cut, Kinskey finally made it to the screen with an uncredited appearance in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932). He went on to become one of the most instantly-recognizable character actors in Hollywood.
Pictures featuring Kinskey include Duck Soup (1933), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Algiers (1938), The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939), Ball of Fire (1942) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1956).
Kinskey is best remembered as Sascha the “crazy Russian” bartender in Casablanca (1942) and was the last-surviving member of its leading cast.
During the Second World War, Kinskey worked with the US government to help select American films to be shown in the Soviet Union. Later in life, he worked extensively on television.
Kinskey acted in eight MGM musicals: The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party, The Merry Widow, Maytime, The Great Waltz, I Married an Angel, Presenting Lily Mars and Nancy Goes to Rio.
German Hermann Bing (1889-1947) is a Pagliacci-like figure, literally starting out as a circus clown, adding comic eccentricity to dozens of films, and driven by depression to take his own life.
Bing left home at 16 to join the circus, and later worked as a comedian in varietétheaters. He entered the German film industry in the early 1920s, apparently working on the production side, though he may also have acted. By the late thirties he was working with F W Murnau, and travelled with him to the United States to work as assistant director on Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). He can also be seen onscreen in a brief appearance as a tram conductor. He went on to assist on Murnau’s 4 Devils (1928).
Bing stayed on in Hollywood and developed a career as a supporting player, playing German characters with exaggerated accents and a general air of frustrated dignity. In the early 1930s, he also appeared in German-language versions of pictures such as Garbo’s Anna Christie (1930) and Menschen hinter Gittern (1931), a version of The Big House (1930) directed by Paul Fejos.
Herman Bing was often uncredited, but always memorable, and his more than 100 feature films included Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), Ford’s Flesh (1932), Borzage’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934) and Barbary Coast (1935) and Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938). He was also the voice of the Ringmaster in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
His career was hit hard by the war and, by the mid-1940s, Bing was struggling to find work, which contributed to his tragic end.
Herman Bing appeared in eleven MGM musicals, including six with Jeanette MacDonald: The Cat and the Fiddle, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie, Maytime, Sweethearts and Bitter Sweet. The others were The Night is Young, Here Comes the Band, The Great Ziegfeld, The Great Waltz and Broadway Melody of 1940.
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.
