Actor and director Arthur Pierson (1901-75) was born in Norway but raised in Seattle.
As an actor, he made it to Broadway in 1929, making his first film three years later, a supporting role in Paramount’s No One Man (1932). The following year he made his sole appearance in an MGM musical, as Lorenzo in The Devil’s Brother.
Pierson left Hollywood in 1935 to return to Broadway. He acted in a couple of more pictures in the forties, but then turned to writing and directing. He went into television as a producer, and ended his career as an executive responsible for story supervision at Hanna-Barbera. Series on which he worked included The Jetsons, Jonny Quest and The Secret Squirrel Show.
Lucile Ruth Browne (1907-76) had been working with a theatre company in Chicago when the Fox Film Corporation gave her the female lead in the western The Last of the Duanes (1930).
Browne’s subsequent career was a combination of featured roles in ‘B’ westerns and uncredited appearances in ‘A’ pictures. For example, in 1935 she played a bit as a nurse in Magnificent Obsession, and also starred opposite Gene Autry in Republic’s singing cowboy picture Tumbling Tumbleweeds.
A rare exception to this rule was a featured role in MGM/Hal Roach’s The Devil’s Brother. Her only other appearance in an MGM musical was as a chorus girl in Sweethearts.
Browne effectively retired in 1938 to raise a family, making only occasional screen appearances thereafter, ending with the Margaret Sullavan weepie No Sad Songs for Me (1950).
James Henderson Finlayson (1887-1953) was acting on the stage in his native Scotland when he travelled with a play to the United States in 1911. His parents had recently died and he decided, along with one of his brothers, to stay there.
Finlayson obtained a part in a 1912 production of Bunty Pulls the Strings, and later worked in vaudeville with Alex Lauder, the lesser-known brother of Harry. He ended up touring with a play that took him to Los Angeles, and never left.
He made his first film appearance in 1917, and by 1919 was working at the Mack Sennett studio. He became a key member of Sennett’s troupe, working repeatedly with Ben Turpin. But in 1922, Finlayson signed with Hal Roach.
Roach tried to groom him as a lead player, but this did not work out. He is said to have considered partnering Finlayson with Laurel and Hardy as a comedy trio, but staff director Leo McCarey realized that the duo was a better bet. So Finlayson became an unofficial third member of the partnership, appearing in thirty-three films with Stan and Ollie, right the way through to Saps at Sea in 1940.
Finlayson always wore a fake walrus moustache and became famous for his overacting, master of the double take and the quizzical or exasperated face, accompanied by the extended cry of ‘D’oooh!’.
James Finlayson was in five Metro musicals, initially with Laurel and Hardy. He featured prominently in The Devil’s Brother, followed by The Bohemian Girl. Later on, when he had become a bit-part player, he appeared in Two Sisters from Boston, Till the Clouds Roll By and Royal Wedding.
Finlayson also worked with Hawks in The Dawn Patrol (1930), Hitchcock in Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Lubitsch in Angel (1937) and To Be or Not to Be (1942).
Thelma Alice Todd (1906-35) made well over 100 film appearances in her brief life, largely in shorts, but also in many notable features.
A teenage beauty pageant winner, Todd inevitably came to the attention of Hollywood scouts. She made a few undemanding appearances for Paramount, before finding a berth at the Hal Roach Studios in 1929. After working successfully with Roach’s stars, including Laurel and Hardy, Todd was eventually partnered with ZaSu Pitts in a double act intended as a distaff version of Stan and Ollie. Though not achieving the comic heights of their models, the Todd and Pitts shorts are entertaining enough, even using the same theme and incidental music as Laurel and Hardy.
Thelma Todd was a gifted comedian, and worked well with the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931) and Horse Feathers (1932). Todd always looks genuinely amused by the comics she is working with, and incorporates this into her performances.
Todd could also play it straight, and was Iva Archer, widow of Sam Spade’s partner, in the first version of The Maltese Falcon (1931).
Todd made two appearances in MGM musicals, both of them in Laurel and Hardy vehicles. She had the female lead in The Devil’s Brother, and was later cast in The Bohemian Girl. Unfortunately, she died before the latter film’s release, and most of her part was edited out.
Thelma’s Todd’s death was deemed to be suicide, but this was always unbelievable to those who knew her, who said she had never shown the slightest sign of depression. She was in a relationship with director Roland West, and it is claimed that he confessed to her murder on his death bed in 1952.
British-born Dennis Pratt (1897-1971) could thank army surgeons for his successful career as an actor and singer. Serving during the First World War, he was injured in battle and required surgery to repair the damage done to his face by shrapnel.
King was a rare performer who was equally at home in Shakespeare and operettas. He made his West End debut in 1919, and was performing on Broadway just two years later. After working for some years as a classical actor, King gained the lead role in Rose-Marie (1924) and then created the role of François Villon in The Vagabond King (1925).
King recreated his stage role in Paramount’s The Vagabond King (1930), the first of his handful of film appearances. In 1933, he worked for Hal Roach and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on The Devil’s Brother.
Dennis King made his first television appearance in 1948, and worked for many years in that medium and on the stage.
Orquesta Hermanos Palau consisted of a core of five brothers: Manolo, Felipe, Luis, Rafael and Raimundo (dates all unknown), and was one of the most popular dance bands in Cuba during the 1930s and 40s. They were, in fact, part of a musical dynasty, dating back to the 1850s and through to today.
In 1931, the band travelled to Hollywood with Ernesto Lecuona, to perform in MGM’s The Cuban Love Song.
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (1896-1963) was a popular and prolific Cuban pianist and composer. Something of a prodigy, he wrote his first song aged 11, and graduated from the National Conservatory of Havana when he was seventeen.
Lecuona travelled the world as a concert pianist, as well as writing around 600 compositions. He wrote film music, but only made one film appearance, performing ‘The Peanut Vendors Song ‘, with the Palau Brothers Orchestra, in The Cuban Love Song.
Lecuona left Cuba for America after the 1959 revolution, before moving to Spain.
Like many another child actor, the career of Philip Finis Cooper (1920-88) was short and sweet. He worked with top Hollywood directors, including Howard Hawks, Victor Felming and William A Wellman, but was in only six pictures, and only two credited roles.
Cooper made his debut as the son found by Lawrence Tibbett at the end of The Cuban Love Song.
Hale Rice Hamilton (1880/83-1942) made his Broadway debut alongside James K Hackett in 1901. After making a couple of short films in 1915, he appeared in his first feature, The Winning of Beatrice (1918), for Metro Pictures. Until 1929, he maintained a dual career, on Broadway and in films. He was also an occasional dramatist.
Hamilton was a character actor, usually credited in a featured role. His most notable appearance was probably as Tom Buchanan in the first screen version of The Great Gatsby (1926). He was also in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), playing Paul Muni’s brother.
Hale Hamilton appeared in one MGM musical, The Cuban Love Song.
Actors who started out in silent comedies of the 1910s tended to accumulate a lot of titles in their IMDb entries. Louise Marie Fazenda (1895-1962), after one appearance in a western, made her first comedy short for Universal in 1913, and went on to accumulate over 260 credits.
Fazenda moved to Mack Sennett at Keystone in 1915, where she came to specialize in slapstick country girls and rubes. She ran Mabel Normand a close second as the studio’s top female comedian, moving to the top when Normand left. Fazenda did a lot of work with Roscoe Arbuckle, Ben Turpin and Ford Sterling.
Fazenda herself left Keystone in 1921 and spent some time in vaudeville. After returning to Hollywood, she worked for various studios and combined more serious films with comedies, rarely the star but always in prominent supporting roles. She did star, alongside W C Fields, in the 1928 production of Tillie’s Punctured Romance, and played Hilda in Michael Curtiz’s Noah’s Ark (also 1928).
Fazenda married the Warner Bros executive Hal B Wallis in 1927 (his nickname around the lot became ‘the Prisoner of Fazenda’) and much of her work in the sound era was for the Warners. Her last film was The Old Maid (1939).
Louise Fazenda made only one appearance in an MGM musical, but it was an excellent piece of work, as Jimmy Durante’s wife Elvira in The Cuban Love Song.
