Henry Stockbridge (1871-1952) was an actor who made his screen debut, in his late fifties, as one of the wise fools in Cecil B DeMille’s Dynamite (1929). The following years he was the uncredited Butterfly Man in DeMille’s Madam Satan.
Stockbridge only appeared in half a dozen films culminating with Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), playing one of the unemployed farmers.
Ella August Hall (1897-1981) came from an acting family, and performed on the stage at an early age. She joined the Biograph Company in 1912, worked for Griffith and Sennett, then played the lead in Lois Weber’s Memories (1913). In total, Hall appeared in nearly 100 films.
Hall worked busily until early 1918, when she took a break following the birth of her first child. She made only a handful of films in the 1920s, and made an uncredited appearance in Madam Satan.
Hall’s final film, without credit, was Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932).
Vera Pogorelsky (1886-1948) was a child actor in Russia before she and her parents emigrated to America with her husband and child in 1905.
Gordon performed in Yiddish theatre, and also worked in the UK for a while in around 1916.
She made her first film in 1920, but worked infrequently in Hollywood, preferring the theatre. Gordon’s best-remembered role is Mrs Cohen in The Cohens and the Kellys (1926) and the series of sequels that followed it. She was the archetypal Jewish mother and, fittingly, made her last appearance in Abie’s Irish Rose (1946).
Gordon only appeared in one MGM musical, a bit part in Madam Satan.
Bit player Kenneth Koch Gibson (1898-1972) spent a lot of time being paid to party. He was in fourteen MGM musicals, and in at least eight of them was a party guest or nightclub patron.
In a career stretching from 1921 to 1969, Gibson notched up approaching 300 screen appearances. He was actually the male lead in his first film, Big Town Ideas (1921), but by 1929 was generally uncredited. He became a regular bit player for Cecil B DeMille and Preston Sturges, and can be found in some excellent pictures, including This Gun for Hire (1942), The Big Sleep (1946), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Star is Born (1954).
Gibson’s musicals at Metro were: Madam Satan, New Moon (1940), Yolanda and the Thief, Luxury Liner, The Barkeleys of Broadway, Duchess of Idaho, The Toast of New Orleans, Rich, Young and Pretty, Singin’ in the Rain, Small Town Girl, Interrupted Melody, It’s Always Fair Weather, I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Ten Thousand Bedrooms.
Laurette Elizabeth Rutherford (1914-68) was the older sister of actor Ann Rutherford, who played one of the O’Hara sisters in Gone with the Wind (1939). Her parents were an opera singer and Lucille Mansfield, a silent film actor.
Arlen began her acting career with an appearance in MGM’s Madam Satan. She was in four more films, credited in the last two. Though chosen as a WAMPAS Baby Star, she had to watch her younger sister gain greater success. Arlen changed her name to Judith Rutherford and pursued a career in radio and as a recording artist. She also performed as a leading lady in local theatre.
Margaret Swope (dates unknown) was a stage actor who worked in both regional theatres and on Broadway during the 1920s and 30s. She was in the original production of Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End in 1934.
Swope appears to have made only two film appearances. She was uncredited in Madam Satan, then had a featured role in The Last Outpost (1935) for Paramount.
Nora Schilling (1905-48) was approached by a casting agent asking if she wanted to be in pictures and, unlike many others, actually got a career out of it.
Lane appeared in at least 80 films in a relatively short career. She made her debut in 1927 and was soon playing lead roles. One of rare uncredited appearances was in Madam Satan.
She appeared in many westerns, including four Hopalong Cassidy pictures. In Western Frontier (1935), Lane even got to play the villainous leader of an outlaw gang.
Sadly, Nora Lane’s husband died unexpectedly in 1948 and she committed suicide a few weeks later.
Ann Roth (1913-79) performed in a vaudeville act with her sister Lillian, to whom she was very similar, but her acting career never took off in the same way.
Ann appeared in a handful of films, including some that starred Lillian, Animal Crackers, Madam Satan (where she acts some serious panic as the zeppelin starts to go down) and Sea Legs (all 1930).
Francis Earl McCarthy (1906-33) was a bit-part player in Hollywood from 1925, when he started in comedy shorts for a Poverty Row studio.
He had a run in 1927-28 playing Hairbreadth Harry in a series of shorts based on the comic strip character. McCarthy was playing solid supporting roles in features at the time of his early death, apparently caused by a heart attack.
McCarthy was uncredited as one of the zeppelin revellers in Madam Satan.
Canadian-born Katherine Lester DeMille (1911-85) was in an orphanage in 1922 when she was adopted by Cecil B DeMille. This led to the good fortune of being given the role of a princess in a major Hollywood picture (The Crusades [1935]) as a birthday present.
DeMille began her acting career on the stage, and worked as a film extra under the name Kay Marsh, in an attempt to avoid nepotism. This did not prevent her father from casting her as one of Henry VIII’s wives in Madam Satan.
Her birth mother was Italian, and DeMille’s dark features helped to secure her the role of Pancho Villa’s wife in Viva Villa! (1934). She secured a contract at Paramount and, later, at Twentieth Century-Fox. Her career was unspectacular, but she tended to garner good reviews, and certainly got by on more than her family connections. She rarely played the lead, but one of the exceptions was her last credited role in The Judge (1949), made for Ida Lupino’s Emerald Productions
