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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. 

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.

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John Joseph Harvey (1881-1954) was acting in films from 1911 and began directing in 1914. A number of his earliest directorial efforts starred Shep, Harvey’s own dog, in pictures such as A Dog’s Love and Shep’s Race with Death (both 1914). 

Harvey continued acting into the sound era, but mostly in uncredited roles. He featured in Lord Byron of Broadway and Anchors Aweigh. He occasionally worked as a screenwriter and his final credit, if he is the same Jack Harvey, was for Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea (1953). 

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