Stella Dorothy Sebaston (1904-57) was a chorus girl who became a stage and then screen actor, securing a five-year contract at Metro. She appeared with Joan Crawford and Johnny Mack Brown in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), and supported them again in Montana Moon, playing Crawford’s sister.
Sebastian appeared in one other MGM musical, Free and Easy, with her friend Buster Keaton. Her contract ended and her career declined through minor studios, ending in playing bit parts.
John Brown (1904-74) was a college football star whose good looks secured him a screen test and a five-year contract with MGM. He played opposite Joan Crawford in Our Dancing Daughters (1928), but his thick Alabama accent meant he was never going to be cast as a city sophisticate after the introduction of sound. Brown’s accent was suitable, however, for the cowboy he played when reteamed with Crawford in Montana Moon.
Brown’s career suffered a double blow in 1931 when he was replaced by the rising Clark Gable in Laughing Sinners, and then failed to secure the lead in Tarzan the Ape Man. His MGM contract ended and Brown spent the rest of his, very successful and prolific, career in Poverty Row westerns, frequently playing characters called ‘Johnny Mack Brown’.
Marion Helen Schilling (1910-2004) was arguably the cinema’s first Scream Queen. With a technique she developed playing onstage with Bela Lugosi in Dracula, she utilized her scream both in her own performances and as a scream-double for other stars.
Shilling’s screen career only involved seven years of her very long life, and was mostly spent in second features, including many low-budget westerns.
The love interest in Lord Byron of Broadway, being both an ‘A’ picture and a musical, was an outlier in Shilling’s career.
Ethelind Terry (1899-1984) made her name on Broadway in the 1920s, most notably as the eponymous heroine of Rio Rita in the original 1927 production.
In 1930 Terry was cast as the vampish Ardis in Lord Byron of Broadway. The film was not a success and she made only one other film appearance, in a 1937 Tex Ritter western.
Charles Kaley (1902-65) was a popular singer and band leader who was unexpectedly–perhaps inexplicably–cast in the lead role in Lord Byron of Broadway. The film provided him with a successful recording of ‘Should I?,’ but Kaley’s acting career progressed no further than a handful of appearances in Poverty Row shorts and features.
Napoleon Bonaparte Kubuck (1893-1953) notched up over 660 film and TV appearances, most of them uncredited.
Phelps was in twenty MGM musicals: They Learned About Women, The Florodora Girl, A Lady’s Morals, Flying High, Dancing Lady, Reckless, A Night at the Opera, Rose-Marie, The Bohemian Girl, The Great Ziegfeld, Sweethearts, Balalaika, Little Nellie Kelly, Born to Sing (a rare onscreen credit), Music for Millions, Anchors Aweigh, The Harvey Girls, Till the Clouds Roll By, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and That Midnight Kiss.
As his name makes clear, Francis Everly Bushman (1903-78) was the son of the screen’s original Messala in Ben-Hur (1925), who himself made an uncredited appearance in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry.
Bushman Jr had a less prestigious career, though he did feature in They Learned About Women as the practical joker Haskins. Some years later he turned up uncredited in Let Freedom Ring.
Tom Dugan (1889-1955) was an Irish actor who appeared in well over 250 Hollywood films. He started out at the tail-end of the silent era, and featured in the first full-length talking picture, Lights of New York (1928). Two of his many appearances stand out. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942) he is the first character seen, the Polish actor Bronski wandering down a city street disguised as Adolf Hitler. And in On the Town he played the sentimental Officer Tracy, who passes around the hat for the three sailors and their girls.
Dugan’s other MGM musicals were They Learned About Women, San Francisco (uncredited), Nobody’s Baby, Easy to Wed (uncredited), as Pooch in the 1947 Good News, Take Me Out to the Ball Game and The Belle of New York (uncredited).
John Charles Nugent (1868-1947) was a vaudeville performer who became a playwright, actor and screenwriter. Several of his plays were adapted for the screen. He was the father of Elliott Nugent, who appeared in So This Is College.
Nugent had supporting roles in They Learned About Women and Love in the Rough.
August Von Glahn (1886-1968) and Joseph Thuma Schenck (1891-1930) were a popular vaudeville, Broadway and recording duo. They combined comedy and singing in their act, with Van’s baritone and Schenck’s light tenor combining in pleasant harmonies, which Schenck accompanied on the piano. They were the first to record, in 1917, ‘For Me and My Gal,’ which went on to become a standard. They also scored a big hit with ‘Ain’t We Got Fun’ in 1925, a song with almost anthemic significance in the 1920s. Gus Van was a talented dialect comedian, and was able to carry that skill into his singing.
Van and Schenck’s first Broadway success was in The Century Girl (1916), the show in which Ziegfeld first launched his signature celestial staircase. Throughout the 1920s they were regular top-liners at the Palace, the New York venue discussed in reverent terms in so many backstage musicals.
Van and Schenck appeared for Vitaphone and MGM in four musical shorts in 1928-29 before their feature debut in They Learned About Women. Any further film career was cruelly curtailed by Schenck’s sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 39.
Gus Van continued performing, latterly in nightclubs, for another 38 years, but never with the same success. His film career ended after a few more musical shorts.
