The Musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Tag: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  • Wilson Benge

    George Frederick Benge (1875-1955) was an English actor who made a living in Hollywood mostly playing butlers, valets, footmen and assorted dogsbodies and lackies. Perhaps his finest hour was as Ronald Colman’s slightly-intrepid valet Danny in Bulldog Drummond (1929).

    It’s not clear when Benge relocated to America, but he made the first of his over-200 screen appearances in 1922, as one of Prince John’s henchmen in Robin Hood. He then played his first butler in The Ten Commandments (1923) (in the modern section, not running the Pharaoh’s household).

    Benge was in six Metro musicals: Madam Satan, (as the butler on a zeppelin) Rosalie, Sweethearts, Living in a Big Way, Royal Wedding and Million Dollar Mermaid.

  • Lotus Thompson

    Lotus Thompson (1904-63) won an Australian beauty contest at the age of 15 on account of her beautiful legs. She took up stage acting after leaving school and made her first film in 1921. She secured some lead roles and was described in publicity as “Australia’s loveliest girl”.

    In 1924, Thompson and her mother moved to Hollywood, and she found work at the Hal Roach studio. There followed, in 1925, a curious incident in which she attempted to scar her legs, allegedly with nitric acid, claiming that she hated the way producers only saw her legs, rather than her potential to play drama. This was either the act of a mentally disturbed young woman, or a publicity stunt.

    Thompson secured a few roles thereafter, but by the mid-30s was taking bit parts. Her final credit was as Eve in Madam Satan.

  • Katharine Irving

    The parents of Katharine Irving (1907-94) were both actors working in Hollywood, so it was probably inevitable that she and her sister Dorothy would also appear in pictures.

    Irving made her debut in 1927, but was only in half a dozen films before marrying and moving to Minnesota, where he spent the rest of her life. Her final appearance, and only credit, was as Spider Girl in Madam Satan.

  • Rina De Liguoro

    Elena Caterina Catardi (1892-1966) was an Italian actor who only made about forty films in a career lasting as many years.

    De Liguoro was a successful concert pianist who was persuaded by her director-husband to try screen acting. She made her debut in 1921, and in 1923 starred as the eponymous Princess Savitri in Savitri Satyavan.  

    Most of De Liguoro’s films were made in Italy, although she worked in several other countries, including the United States, where she made Madam Satan. MGM billed her, without any apparent justification, as Countess De Liguoro.

    Rina De Liguoro resumed her concert career in the 1930s, and her final film appearance was in Visconti’s The Leopard (1963).

  • Earl Askam

    Earl Leslie Rengstorff Askam (1891-1940) was an opera singer and stage and film actor, who achieved cult immortality by playing Officer Torch in Flash Gordon (1936). He also played in a dozen low-budget westerns.

    Askam was the Pirate at the zeppelin ball in Madam Satan. As was most often the case, he appeared uncredited in The Great Ziegfeld.

  • Albert Conti

    Albert Maroica Blasius Franz Maria, Ritter Conti von Cedassamare (1887-1967) came from Austrian aristocracy and was born and raised in an area that is now in Italy.

    After serving in the First World War, Conti emigrated to America in 1919. He worked in a series of manual jobs, then responded to an advertisement by Erich Von Stroheim, who was seeking an Austrian military officer to act as technical adviser on The Merry-Go-Round (1923). He was given a part in the film, and this launched his career as an actor who would make well over 100 films.

    Conti worked on several other Von Stroheim pictures, and otherwise played character roles, frequently continental and often military, as in Morocco (1930) and The Black Cat (1934). He was often uncredited.

    Conti played the Empire Officer in Madam Satan and appeared without credit in The Night is Young.

  • Martha Sleeper

    Martha Sleeper (1910-83) reversed the usual actor’s journey of her day by starting out in films and transitioning to Broadway.

    Sleeper made her first film appearance in 1923, aged 12. She was spotted by Hal Roach, who signed her to appear in comedy sorts. She appeared in a number of early films directed by Leo McCarey.

    Aged 17, Sleeper was selected as a WAMPAS Baby Star, and played the lead in half-a-dozen pictures in 1928-29 for a minor studio. She was then signed by MGM and played many supporting roles. Two of these were as Fish Girl in Madam Satan and an uncredited appearance in Hollywood Party.

    Sleeper was unhappy with the work she was doing, and began seeking roles in local stage productions. In 1936, she effectively retired from screen acting and moved with her husband to New York, where she worked for ten years both on and off Broadway. She also began designing jewellery. 

    Sleeper made one last film in 1945, The Bells of St Mary’s, as a favour to Leo McCarey. In 1949, she relocated to Puerto Rico, where she began designing clothes, running her own business for twenty years.

  • Julanne Johnston

    Julanne Johnston (1900-88) was a dancer who appeared in her first film in 1917. Her big chance came when Douglas Fairbanks cast her as the Princess in The Thief of Bagdad (1924). 

    Unfortunately, after a few years, including one film in Germany, her career fizzled out and by 1929 she was doing small supporting roles, one of which was as Miss Conning Tower in Madam Satan. 

    Johnston retired in 1934.

  • Theodore Kosloff

    Fyodor Mikhailovich Kozlov ((1882-1956) was a Russian ballet dancer who, from 1901, toured with the Diaghilev company.

    After touring internationally for some years, Kosloff settled in the United States in 1912, staging ballets in New York and providing choreography for Broadway musicals. 

    In 1917, Agnes DeMille encouraged her uncle Cecil to use Kosloff’s talents in one of his films. He made his  acting debut in The Woman God Forgot (1917), and combined a film career with stage acting and ballet. He also opened a school of dance.Meanwhile, his private life became increasingly chaotic and, at times violent, as he maintained relationships with multiple women, some of them underage.

    Kosloff acted in films throughout the 1920s, usually in ‘Latin lover’ roles, and mostly for DeMille. He more or less stopped acting after the introduction of sound, his last significant appearance being as Electricity in the ‘Ballet Mécanique’ in Madam Satan, to which it is also believe he contributed choreography (LeRoy Prinz being the credited dance director). His final screen appearance was as a dance instructor in Stage Door (1937).

    Kosloff continued to work as a dance director, and his final contribution to cinema was work on DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). 

  • Ynez Seabury

    Ynez Seabury (1907-73) made her screen debut at the age of 4 in D W Griffith’s The Miser’s Heart (1911). She went on to make many other films for Griffith, as well as making her first stage appearance in 1912.

    Seabury took a break from films in 1914, returning in 1923 to play a Native American for the first, but not the last, time. This aspect of her work reportedly led to her becoming close to members of the Hopi tribe.

    Ynez Seabury worked sporadically in films through to 1949, usually in uncredited roles. She worked several times for Cecil B DeMille, and her last appearance was in his Samson and Delilah (1949).

    She appeared in two Metro musicals, Madam Satan and The Girl of the Golden West (playing Wowkle, a Native American character).

    One puzzle stands out in Seabury’s IMDb entry. She is said to have played a little girl in The Sign of the Cross (1932), but she would have been about 25 at the time.

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