Leonard Charles Shumway (1884-1954) appeared in over 450 films in his forty-year career, with the earliest-known title being 1913’s The Snake, where he was Leon C Shumway. In his final film he played a bartender in Calamity Jane (1953). He had previous stage experience.
Shumway’s roles fluctuated between credited and uncredited, with one of the former being as the Coach in So This Is College.
Eugene Meszaros (1892-1947) was a Hungarian actor who, it may be assumed, moved to the United States at a young age, since he acted with an American accent.
Stone made his first film in 1927, at a relatively advanced age (around 35), suggesting he may have come from the stage. He started out with featured roles, but his role in So This Is College seems to have done little for his career, as he was uncredited thereafter.
Émile Chautard (1864-1934) was forty-four when he made his first screen appearance in 1910, following a successful stage career. He directed his first film in the same year, and was appointed head of production at Paris’s Éclair Films in 1913. Between 1910 and 1924, Chautard directed over 100 films, but stopped acting in 1917. During a period at the World Film Company in 1915, he trained an apprentice cutter named Josef Von Sternberg.
Chautard took a job with Famous Player-Lasky in around 1922, but only directed a handful of films in America. He returned to acting, making around over sixty appearances. Notable films included 7th Heaven (1927) and three by his former protegé, Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus (both 1932). In the last of these, Von Sternberg cast him as a nightclub manager named Chautard. He was also in the French-language versions of several pictures.
Chautard was in Marianne and Free and Easy. He was uncredited in the latter, which was increasingly the case during the final years of his career.
Robert Edeson (1868-1931) was an actor on Broadway and a vaudeville performer before making his film debut in 1914, starring in Cecil B DeMille’s The Call of the North. He had played his role in the original stage production.
Edeson continued to play leading roles throughout the silent era, including as Colonel Zapt in Rex Ingram’s 1922 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. He also created the first screen version of lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago (1927).
Edeson acquired his most unusual assignment when actor Rudolph Christians died before Erich Von Stroheim had completed Foolish Wives (1922). Edeson took over as the character, but always acting with his back to the camera.
Robert Edeson’s only involvement in MGM musicals was as the General in Marianne.
Walter Scott Kolk (1905-93) was a professional drummer before becoming an actor, and also sang in revues.
Kolk made his film debut in Marianne, and the following year experienced the harsher side of the First World War when he played one of the volunteers in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
Shortly before finally retiring from acting (he had taken several years out in the early thirties), Kolk portrayed the eponymous hero on the 12-part serial Secret Agent X-9 (1937), based on a comic strip co-written by Dashiell Hammett.
The singing group the Dixie Jubilee Singers appeared in two feature films, both in 1929. One was Universal’s near-silent version of Show Boat, where they sang in an added two-reel sound prologue alongside performers from the original Broadway show.
There other film was Hallelujah, in which they joined Daniel Haynes in singing Irving Berlin’s ‘Waiting at the End of the Road’.
Everett McGarrity (1908-93) was discovered by King Vidor studying music at a conservatory in Chicago while the director was on a nationwide search for Black actors to appear in Hallelujah.
McGarrity gives a strong performance, but never made another film.
Fanny Belle Johnson(1869-1950) began working with her pianist-husband as a comic reciter, usually in dialect, from the 1890s.
DeKnight did some legitimate theatre work, usually cast in ‘Mammy’ roles, and it was this that led King Vidor to choose her to play the mother in Hallelujah.
She made one further, uncredited, film appearance, then returned with her husband to their previous touring act.
June Pursell (1902-??) was a radio singer and recording artist dubbed “the girl with the ballad voice”.
Pursell (whose name was frequently mispelled) appeared in two feature films, one of which was The Hollywood Revue of 1929. She performed ‘Low Down Rhythm’ and subsequently released the number as a recording.
Russian-born Nathalie Schmit (1905-88) trained as a dancer at the Paris Opéra and, from 1924, was in a dancing partnership with Gene Myrio. They worked as headline dancers in London and New York, demonstrating a very acrobatic form of adagio dancing.
After that act broke up, Nattova toured the vaudeville circuit with other male dancers, marrying one of them along the way. One of their routines involved a giant flower pot: “Flying through space, she executed an arabesque on an azalea, a pirouette on a poppy and a toe-hold on a tulip. Nattova showed ‘great grace in movement’”.
It was this iteration (miscredited as Natova and Company) that appeared in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
