The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Vivien Oakland

    Vivian Ruth Andersen (1895-1958) began performing in a vaudeville act with her sister, and later worked on Broadway. She made one film on the east coast in 1915, but her Hollywood career started in 1924.

    Oakland did a lot of work for the Hal Roach studio, and at different times played the wife of both Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel. She also played Edgar Kennedy’s wife in a series of shorts. Most of her pictures were shorts and programmers, though Oakland did have a small role in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).

    In The Florodora Girl, Oakland was Maud, in a double act with Ilka Chase as Marion Davies’s friends.

  • Nicholas Caruso

    Canadian-born Nicholas Caruso Cosentino (1906-59) made appearances in three films between 1928 and 1932. The middle one was In Gay Madrid, as one of the students in the House of Troy.

  • Bruce Coleman

    It can be inferred that Bruce Coleman (1910-78) had issues with his weight from the fact proffered by IMDb that his nickname was Chubby. Moreover, in his debut film, In Gay Madrid, he played a character named Corpulento.

    Coleman only appeared in one other picture, and apparently spent most of his life in California. 

  • David Scott

    David Charles Scott (1911-83)was an actor who, aged 19, had a featured role as Ernesto in In Gay Madrid. He is known to have made two other features, released in 1935 and 1936.

    What Scott did for the remaining forty-seven years of his life is unknown.

  • Herbert Clark

    Herbert Clark (1904-63) was a Broadway actor who appeared in three films in 1929-30. One of these was In Gay Madrid, in which he played the student Octavio.

    Clark had the misfortune to become engaged in 1926, only to be informed by his father that his fiancée was, in fact, his half-sister. The vital information was initially provided in a telegram: “Katherine Clark is your sister. Am mailing letter containing full explanation”.

  • Nanci Price

    Irma Margaret Kobiela (1917-2005) worked in New York, and later in Hollywood, as a child actor. Her career lasted from 1922 to 1933.

    Price had the featured role of Jacinta, who is tied up and locked in a wardrobe (!) in In Gay Madrid.

  • William V Mong

    In 1924, a newspaper said of former stage actor William V Mong (1875-1940): “That middle initial of William V. Mong’s name must indeed stand for versatility. For in his sixteen years upon the screen he has played hundreds of characters, ranging from heroes to villains of deepest dye, all nationalities.”

    This does not tell half the story. As well as accumulating over 200 acting appearances on screen, Mong wrote and/or directed dozens of films in the 1910s and early 20s. In the early days, he established the first scenario department at the Selig Company (“a second-hand desk, two pencils and a pen”).

    As a sideline, he had a ranch and bred pedigree pigs.

    One of Mong’s many credits was as the father of the heroine in Metro’s In Gay Madrid.

  • Eugenie Besserer

    Playing Auntie Em in the first screen adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) was the first of over 200 appearances by Eugenie Besserer (1868-1934).

    Born in France, Besserer was raised in Canada. Left an orphan, she ran away and found an uncle who lived in New York, and who agreed to take her in.

    Besserer worked on the legitimate stage for a number of years, and was 42 when she made her first film. Perhaps for that reason, she developed something of a specialism in playing mothers, culminating in the role of Mrs Rabinowitz, Al Jolson’s mother, in The Jazz Singer (1927).

    In her one MGM musical, Besserer played Doña Generosa, matriarch of the House of Troy in In Gay Madrid.

  • James Bradbury Jr

    James Horatio Bradbury Jr (1894-1936) was the son of two actors and made his stage debut while still a child.

    After serving in the First World War, Bradbury settled in Hollywood, where he maintained a steady career as a character actor and supporting player. In the silent era, he combined higher-quality pictures such as Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928) with many low-budget westerns.

    After the introduction of sound, Bradbury played one of the bandits in The Rogue Song, but the general quality of his parts declined and he eventually took his own life, self-immolating in a failed attempt at suicide by gas.

  • Burr McIntosh

    William Burr McIntosh (1862-1942) was a man of many parts: writer, publisher, photographer, entrepreneur. And silent film actor.

    McIntosh had already achieved success publishing The Burr McIntosh Monthly, an early example of the pinup magazine, when he turned to screen acting.  He starred in a series of 14 two-reel shorts playing J Rufus Wallingford, a con man.

    The high point of McIntosh’s acting career was his performance as Lillian Gish’s cruel father in D W Griffith’s Way Down East (1920).

    McIntosh’s sole outing in an MGM musical was as Count Peter in the lost film, The Rogue Song.

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