The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Category: Stars and Supporting Players

  • Max Barwyn

    Max Barwyn (1884-1955) made his first screen appearance in 1926 and went on to over 70 more. He was one of those supporting players who looked like he belonged in the service industries, and played waiters more than two dozen times. From left-fields, just for a change, he was cast as Napoleon Bonaparte in Brigadier Gerard (1927), which may have equipped him for his multiple roles as a maitre d’. 

    Barwyn acted in nine MGM musicals, starting with the 1930 New Moon.  He was then in Dancing Lady, The Night is Young, Broadway Melody of 1936, Rose-Marie, Sweethearts, Bitter Sweet, The Chocolate Soldier (a rare credited role) and Rhapsody.

  • Emily Fitzroy

    Emily Fitzroy (1860-1954) was acting on the British stage years before cinema was invented. But this did not prevent her notching up over a hundred film appearances.

    Fitzroy relocated to the United States and performed regularly on Broadway. She made her first screen appearance in 1913, for the Philadelphia-based Lubin company, later working for Fox when the company was located in the east.

    From the ages of 60 to 83, Fitzroy worked steadily as a character actor, latterly based in Hollywood, with a notable appearance as Mrs Hawks in the first screen version of Show Boat (1929). Her final film took her back to (a make-believe) England in Clarence Brown’s The White Cliffs of Dover (1944).

    Fitzroy played Countess Anastasia in the 1930 version of New Moon.

  • Adolphe Menjou

    Adolphe Jean Menjou (1890-1963) was born in Pittsburgh, but for almost fifty years he epitomized a type of continental sophistication on the screen.

    Menjou made his debut in 1914 for the Vitagraph Company and within a few years had become a supporting player of note, appearing in films as prestigious as The Three Musketeers (playing the King) and The Sheik (both 1921).

    Menjou’s role as the seducer in Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris (1923) was the template for the kind of philandering, morally-questionable characters he made his speciality. He was never the leading man, but always brought considerable added value to the films he was in. His sole Oscar nomination was for playing Walter Burns in The Front Page (1931).

    Menjou was a leading Hollywood conservative, though arguably more nuanced in his views than some of his colleagues.

    Adolphe Menjou’s greatest performance may have been one of his last, as the corrupt general in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). Much earlier, he had appeared, with typical suavity, in the 1930 version of New Moon.

  • Cecilia Parker

    Cecilia Parker (1914-93) and her family emigrated from Canada to Los Angeles when she was a child, which was the gateway to her obtaining extra work and a place on a training course at Fox Studios.

    Aged 16, she appeared (literally) alongside her younger sister Linda, playing Siamese twins in A Lady’s Morals. She went on to play in three other MGM musicals: Naughty Marietta, Love Finds Andy Hardy and Seven Sweethearts.

    Cecilia Parker was in all but two of the Andy Hardy pictures, playing Andy’s sister, having previously appeared, as the love interest, in the series’s progenitor, Ah, Wilderness! (1935). 

    Parker more or less retired from acting in 1942, but returned for the failed Andy Hardy revival, Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958).

  • Mavis Villiers

    Mavis Clare Cooney (1909-76) emigrated from Australia with her family when she was eleven. Soon afterwards, Mary Pickford gave her a small role in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921).

    Villiers was in half a dozen films over the next ten years, culminating in A Lady’s Morals. She and her mother emigrated to the UK in 1933.

    Villiers worked extensively on the British stage and, later, on television. She also made occasional feature films, most notably as Katherine Hepburn’s companion in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and as one of the blackmailers in Victim (1961).

  • Joan Standing

    Joan Standing (1903-79) was born into a British theatrical family and pursued a minor career in Hollywood as a supporting player. She made her debut in 1919 in The Loves of Letty, made by the Goldwyn Studios.

    Standing’s best-known role was unquestionably Nurse Briggs in Dracula (1931) where, under hypnosis, she gives the vampire access to the sleeping Mina.

    Joan Standing made one appearance in an MGM musical, as Louise in A Lady’s Morals.

  • Bodil Rosing

    Bodil Frederikke Hammerich (1877-1941) was a stage actor in her native Denmark who made several appearances on Broadway in the early twenties.

    Rosing had retired from the stage when she travelled to Hollywood with her daughter Tova, who had married actor Monte Blue. While there, she secured a small role in MGM’s Pretty Ladies (1925), beginning a career as a character actor that would run to around 80 appearances.

    Rosing was frequently cast in matronly roles, often as maids, cooks and housekeepers. Most memorably, she was the maid in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

    Bodil Rosing appeared in two MGM musicals: as the innkeeper’s wife in A Lady’s Morals, and uncredited in an identical role in The Great Waltz.

  • Giovanni Martino

    Giovanni Martino (1884-19??) was an Italian operatic bass singer. He made his professional debut in 1907 and by 1919 was performing in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. By 1927, He had appeared in around 120 productions at the Met.

    In 1930, Martino was one of the many from the New York stage recruited by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, appearing with Grace Moore in A Lady’s Morals. 

    His career in films was short, though he did have a featured role in El presidio (1930), the Spanish-language version of The Big House (1930).

    For such a notable performer, it is strange that details of his later years seem unavailable.

  • Paul Porcasi

    Italian actor Paul Porcasi (1879-1946) was a stage performer, both in straight theatre and grand opera. He made a few silent films for East coast companies from 1917 onwards, but began his screen career in earnest when he travelled to Hollywood in 1929 to recreate the role of Nick Verdis in the adaptation of the eponymous Broadway hit, Broadway.

    Porcasi went on to accumulate 140 credits for character roles in just sixteen years. He was the apple vendor who catches Fay Wray stealing in King Kong (1933), and in Casablanca (1942) he played a fez-wearing local who provides the exposition explaining the character Ferrari.

    Most of Porcasi’s parts were Hollywood-exotic, though rarely as left-field as when he played Benito Mussolini in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942).

    Porcasi made appearances in four MGM musicals. A Lady’s Morals and its French-language remake were followed by three pictures starring Jeanette MacDonald, The Cat and the Fiddle, Rose-Marie and Maytime.

  • George F Marion

    George Francis Marion (1860-1945) was a notable stage actor who made forays in films from 1915 to 1935. He also directed and choreographed on the stage, and directed two films in 1916.

    Marion created the role of Chris in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1921), and recreated the part in the 1930 film version starring Greta Garbo. In the same year, he appeared as the innkeeper in A Lady’s Morals.

    Marion’s son, George F Marion Jr, made what might be considered more significant contributions to the film musical when he co-wrote Love Me Tonight (1932) and The Gay Divorcee (1934).

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