Helen Johnson (1906-2002) had a very brief career in leading roles, followed by a slow decline under the name Judith Wood, culminating in an uncredited appearance in The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
In the early 30s, Johnson appeared in a number of ‘A’ features, most notably as the feckless Pat Thayer in Children of Pleasure.
Winifred Elaine Gibson (1898-1987) was an actor who starred in films without ever really becoming a film star. She had performed in vaudeville, burlesque and musical comedies before featuring in Nothing But the Truth (1929). The following year she was given the female lead in Children of Pleasure.
Thereafter, Gibson mostly appeared in ‘B’ pictures; Richard Barrios calls her “one of the best tough blondes in Depression cinema”. In the 1950s, as she moved into television work, she and her partner, Beverley Roberts, were heavily involved in the development of theatrical trade unionism in New York.
Lottice Howell (1897-1982) was a versatile soprano who was happy in both opera and the vaudeville stage.
Howell signed a contract with MGM in 1929, but only appeared in a handful of films before returning to the stage. Two of these were the musicals Free and Easy and In Gay Madrid.
Cecil Blount DeMille (1881-1959) was one of the founders of Hollywood cinema. After a fairly successful career as a stage actor, and less success as a playwright, he helped to found the Jesse L Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount) in 1913. DeMille and a team of actors and technicians relocated from New York to Los Angeles and established the first studio in the Hollywood area. His first production was The Squawman (1914), a story he remade twice, in 1918 and 1931.
DeMille produced and directed films in Hollywood for the next forty-three years, ending with The Ten Commandments in 1956. Veering wildly between the prurient and the pious, his work was usually commercially successful, and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) won one of the all-time most baffling Best Picture Oscars, beating The Quiet Man and High Noon; Singin’ in the Rain was not even nominated.
DeMille directed one of MGM’s strangest musicals, Madam Satan, in which he provided the voice coming from a radio. He also appeared, as himself, in Free and Easy.
John Leslie Coogan (1914-84) claimed his place in cinema history at a very young age when he played the eponymous character in Chaplin’s The Kid (1921). It is a performance for the ages, though the downside is that Coogan’s parents exploited his earnings, with subsequent legal action culminating in the California Child Actors Bill (the Coogan Act).
Unlike many other child actors who have immediate success, Coogan had other substantial parts while young, such as Oliver Twist (1922) and Tom Sawyer (1930), and also continued his career into adulthood. He found renewed fame in the sixties playing Uncle Fester in The Addams Family (1964-66). His final credit, as far removed as possible from The Kid, was in the 1983 slasher movie The Prey.
Jackie Coogan made two appearances in Metro musicals, and with the longest gap between of any performer. In 1930 he appeared as himself in the Hollywood-set Free and Easy. Thirty-five years later he played a cop in Girl Happy (1965), an Elvis Presley vehicle. Chaplin to Presley is a long journey.
Edward Santree Brophy (1895-1960) was one of the most recognizable character actors in Golden Age Hollywood, both physically and vocally. He made his first screen appearance in 1920, but mostly worked as a unit manager or assistant director during the twenties.
After standing in for an absent actor in Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928) (on which he was working as unit manager), Brophy’s acting career took off, aided by several other supporting roles with Keaton. He specialized in cops, gangsters and sidekicks, notably Goldie Locke in the Falcon series. His distinctive New York accent also won him the voice role of Timothy Q Mouse in Disney’s Dumbo (1941).
Brophy made a couple of uncredited appearances in MGM musicals: with Keaton again, in Free and Easy, and in Broadway to Hollywood. He was then credited as Zeke, one of the settlers who tramp-tramp-tramps with Nelson Eddy in Naughty Marietta.
In keeping with Brophy’s Runyonesque personality, it is fitting that he is alleged to have died while watching a boxing match.
Actor, poet, suffragist and body-positive activist Delia O’Callaghan (1870-1955) had been a star in vaudeville for many years before making her first film appearance in 1923. She had a featured role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1928), but her best part was probably Ma Plunkett in Free and Easy, which allowed her to demonstrate some of the comedic and musical skills she had honed on the stage.
The weirdest item in Friganza’s filmography is How to Undress in Front of Your Husband (1937), an ‘educational’ short in which she and Elaine Barrymore demonstrate the right and wrong ways for a woman to get ready for bed. Friganza was 67 at the time, but still game.
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.
