The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Wallace Beery

    Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (1885-1949) shares with Edward G Robinson the honour of being the 1930s’ most unlikely-looking star/leading man. Beery was, during his heyday, successfully marketed by MGM as a lovable slob, but seems to have been disliked by virtually everyone he worked with, for his constant upstaging and unpleasant behaviour. Jackie Cooper, who worked with him four times when a child actor, claimed they, after Beery died, they “couldn’t find eight guys to carry his casket”.

    Wallace Beery was that rare entertainer who actually did run away from home to join the circus. A few years later he began stage work, singing in comic operas, and then on Broadway and in summer stock. 

    He made his first film, for Essanay, in 1913, the first of more than 200 appearances. He also directed a number of shorts for Essanay and for Nestor Pictures between 1913 and 1919.

    Beery specialized in playing villains during the 1920s, though one of his more prominent roles was as King Richard in Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922).  And in 1925 he was cast as Professor Challenger in First National’s The Lost World. 

    MGM signed Beery as a character actor, but he unexpectedly became a leading man after being teamed with Marie Dressler in Min and Bill (1930). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Champ (1931), tying with Fredric March (who had actually received a higher number of votes). 

    Beery appeared three times in MGM musicals. In A Lady’s Morals, he had a supporting role as P T Barnum. In Going Hollywood, he features in archival footage at a premiere. And in A Date with Judy, his penultimate picture, he was top billed as Elizabeth Taylor’s dad.

  • Grace Moore

    Mary Willie Grace Moore (1898-1947), ‘the Tennessee Nightingale’, is thought of as an opera singer who, like Lawrence Tibbett, was enticed to Hollywood and a lower form of musical entertainment. In fact, Grace Moore was no stranger to performing popular songs. She had funded her training by singing in nightclubs, and made appearances in Broadway revues in the early 20s, well before she made her 1928 debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

    Moore’s ambition in going to Hollywood, she said later, was to “help carve a niche for good music in the then-developing field of sound pictures”. So ‘The Tennessee Nightingale’ went to play Jenny Lind, ‘the Swedish Nightingale’, in A Lady’s Morals. The only thing worse than the film’s title, Moore claimed, was her acting. If her acting was not everything that might be desired, it was so in two languages, as she also starred in the French-language version.

    Moore and Tibbett were subsequently paired in New Moon, and then she called it a day on screen acting and went back to the stage. With the downturn in the popularity of film musicals, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

    Moore returned to Hollywood in 1934, and made six pictures for Columbia, including the very successful One Night of Love (1934). She made her ninth and final film in France, Louise (1939), directed by Abel Gance.

    Grace Moore’s life and career ended tragically in 1947 when she died in a plane crash. She was later portrayed by Kathryn Grayson in Warner’s lacklustre biopic, So This is Love (1953).

  • June Knight

    Margaret Rose Valliket (1913-87) is the mysterious Marie Valli, whose sole credit on IMDb is Madam Satan, playing, quite aptly, Confusion.

    Shortly afterwards, she changed her name to June Knight and went on to a successful career on Broadway and, to a lesser extent, in Hollywood. Her one other MGM musical was Broadway Melody of 1936, in which she was the first person to sing ‘I Gotta Feelin’ You’re Foolin’’.

    Knight made a habit of launching standards, introducing ‘Just One of Those Things’ and ‘Begin the Beguine’ in Broadway shows. She also sang Cole Porter’s ‘A Picture of Me Without You’, with its memorable couplet “Picture Central Park without a sailor/Picture Mr Lord minus Mr Taylor”.

  • Wilfred Lucas

    Wilfred Van Norman Lucas (1871-1940) is believed to have appeared in around 400 films between 1908 and 1940, as well as directing over 50.

    Lucas was Canadian, moving to the United States in his teens. He started out as a singer, performing both light and grand opera, and also made some appearances on Broadway. The Biograph Company hired him in 1908, where he worked with D W Griffith. His first starring role in a feature, alongside the young Bessie Love, was in Acquitted (1916). 

    In the same year, along with many other friends of the director, Lucas played a cameo in Griffith’s Intolerance.

    Lucas made a successful transition to sound pictures, where he worked a number of times with Laurel and Hardy, including as the Warden in Pardon Us (1931) and the Dean in A Chump at Oxford (1940).

    Lucas was in three MGM musicals: Madam Satan, The Devil’s Brother (as Alessandro, again with Stan and Ollie) and Naughty Marietta.

  • Lotus Thompson

    Lotus Thompson (1904-63) won an Australian beauty contest at the age of 15 on account of her beautiful legs. She took up stage acting after leaving school and made her first film in 1921. She secured some lead roles and was described in publicity as “Australia’s loveliest girl”.

    In 1924, Thompson and her mother moved to Hollywood, and she found work at the Hal Roach studio. There followed, in 1925, a curious incident in which she attempted to scar her legs, allegedly with nitric acid, claiming that she hated the way producers only saw her legs, rather than her potential to play drama. This was either the act of a mentally disturbed young woman, or a publicity stunt.

    Thompson secured a few roles thereafter, but by the mid-30s was taking bit parts. Her final credit was as Eve in Madam Satan.

  • Katharine Irving

    The parents of Katharine Irving (1907-94) were both actors working in Hollywood, so it was probably inevitable that she and her sister Dorothy would also appear in pictures.

    Irving made her debut in 1927, but was only in half a dozen films before marrying and moving to Minnesota, where he spent the rest of her life. Her final appearance, and only credit, was as Spider Girl in Madam Satan.

  • Rina De Liguoro

    Elena Caterina Catardi (1892-1966) was an Italian actor who only made about forty films in a career lasting as many years.

    De Liguoro was a successful concert pianist who was persuaded by her director-husband to try screen acting. She made her debut in 1921, and in 1923 starred as the eponymous Princess Savitri in Savitri Satyavan.  

    Most of De Liguoro’s films were made in Italy, although she worked in several other countries, including the United States, where she made Madam Satan. MGM billed her, without any apparent justification, as Countess De Liguoro.

    Rina De Liguoro resumed her concert career in the 1930s, and her final film appearance was in Visconti’s The Leopard (1963).

  • Earl Askam

    Earl Leslie Rengstorff Askam (1891-1940) was an opera singer and stage and film actor, who achieved cult immortality by playing Officer Torch in Flash Gordon (1936). He also played in a dozen low-budget westerns.

    Askam was the Pirate at the zeppelin ball in Madam Satan. As was most often the case, he appeared uncredited in The Great Ziegfeld.

  • Albert Conti

    Albert Maroica Blasius Franz Maria, Ritter Conti von Cedassamare (1887-1967) came from Austrian aristocracy and was born and raised in an area that is now in Italy.

    After serving in the First World War, Conti emigrated to America in 1919. He worked in a series of manual jobs, then responded to an advertisement by Erich Von Stroheim, who was seeking an Austrian military officer to act as technical adviser on The Merry-Go-Round (1923). He was given a part in the film, and this launched his career as an actor who would make well over 100 films.

    Conti worked on several other Von Stroheim pictures, and otherwise played character roles, frequently continental and often military, as in Morocco (1930) and The Black Cat (1934). He was often uncredited.

    Conti played the Empire Officer in Madam Satan and appeared without credit in The Night is Young.

  • Martha Sleeper

    Martha Sleeper (1910-83) reversed the usual actor’s journey of her day by starting out in films and transitioning to Broadway.

    Sleeper made her first film appearance in 1923, aged 12. She was spotted by Hal Roach, who signed her to appear in comedy sorts. She appeared in a number of early films directed by Leo McCarey.

    Aged 17, Sleeper was selected as a WAMPAS Baby Star, and played the lead in half-a-dozen pictures in 1928-29 for a minor studio. She was then signed by MGM and played many supporting roles. Two of these were as Fish Girl in Madam Satan and an uncredited appearance in Hollywood Party.

    Sleeper was unhappy with the work she was doing, and began seeking roles in local stage productions. In 1936, she effectively retired from screen acting and moved with her husband to New York, where she worked for ten years both on and off Broadway. She also began designing jewellery. 

    Sleeper made one last film in 1945, The Bells of St Mary’s, as a favour to Leo McCarey. In 1949, she relocated to Puerto Rico, where she began designing clothes, running her own business for twenty years.

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