Mavis Clare Cooney (1909-76) emigrated from Australia with her family when she was eleven. Soon afterwards, Mary Pickford gave her a small role in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921).
Villiers was in half a dozen films over the next ten years, culminating in A Lady’s Morals. She and her mother emigrated to the UK in 1933.
Villiers worked extensively on the British stage and, later, on television. She also made occasional feature films, most notably as Katherine Hepburn’s companion in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and as one of the blackmailers in Victim (1961).
Joan Standing (1903-79) was born into a British theatrical family and pursued a minor career in Hollywood as a supporting player. She made her debut in 1919 in The Loves of Letty, made by the Goldwyn Studios.
Standing’s best-known role was unquestionably Nurse Briggs in Dracula (1931) where, under hypnosis, she gives the vampire access to the sleeping Mina.
Joan Standing made one appearance in an MGM musical, as Louise in A Lady’s Morals.
Bodil Frederikke Hammerich (1877-1941) was a stage actor in her native Denmark who made several appearances on Broadway in the early twenties.
Rosing had retired from the stage when she travelled to Hollywood with her daughter Tova, who had married actor Monte Blue. While there, she secured a small role in MGM’s Pretty Ladies (1925), beginning a career as a character actor that would run to around 80 appearances.
Rosing was frequently cast in matronly roles, often as maids, cooks and housekeepers. Most memorably, she was the maid in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
Bodil Rosing appeared in two MGM musicals: as the innkeeper’s wife in A Lady’s Morals, and uncredited in an identical role in The Great Waltz.
Giovanni Martino (1884-19??) was an Italian operatic bass singer. He made his professional debut in 1907 and by 1919 was performing in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. By 1927, He had appeared in around 120 productions at the Met.
In 1930, Martino was one of the many from the New York stage recruited by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, appearing with Grace Moore in A Lady’s Morals.
His career in films was short, though he did have a featured role in El presidio (1930), the Spanish-language version of The Big House (1930).
For such a notable performer, it is strange that details of his later years seem unavailable.
Italian actor Paul Porcasi (1879-1946) was a stage performer, both in straight theatre and grand opera. He made a few silent films for East coast companies from 1917 onwards, but began his screen career in earnest when he travelled to Hollywood in 1929 to recreate the role of Nick Verdis in the adaptation of the eponymous Broadway hit, Broadway.
Porcasi went on to accumulate 140 credits for character roles in just sixteen years. He was the apple vendor who catches Fay Wray stealing in King Kong (1933), and in Casablanca (1942) he played a fez-wearing local who provides the exposition explaining the character Ferrari.
Most of Porcasi’s parts were Hollywood-exotic, though rarely as left-field as when he played Benito Mussolini in Star Spangled Rhythm (1942).
Porcasi made appearances in four MGM musicals. A Lady’s Morals and its French-language remake were followed by three pictures starring Jeanette MacDonald, The Cat and the Fiddle, Rose-Marie and Maytime.
George Francis Marion (1860-1945) was a notable stage actor who made forays in films from 1915 to 1935. He also directed and choreographed on the stage, and directed two films in 1916.
Marion created the role of Chris in Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1921), and recreated the part in the 1930 film version starring Greta Garbo. In the same year, he appeared as the innkeeper in A Lady’s Morals.
Marion’s son, George F Marion Jr, made what might be considered more significant contributions to the film musical when he co-wrote Love Me Tonight (1932) and The Gay Divorcee (1934).
Gilbert Emery Bensley Pottle (1875-1945) was a successful author and playwright (sometimes under the name Emery Pottle) both before and during his career as a screen character actor. At least one of his plays, The Hero (1921), has been revived in the 21st century.
Following some stage acting, Emery made his first film, for Vitagraph, in 1921, but only appeared in one other silent film. From 1929 onwards, however, he accumulated around 80 credits.
Emery only appeared in one MGM musical, A Lady’s Morals, but he also contributed to the screenplays of a number of pictures, one of which was The Cuban Love Song.
Jobyna Howland (1880-1936) was a stage actor who made occasional film appearances.
Howland made her debut aged 17, and performed widely in regional and touring productions, before working on Broadway, where she played her final role shortly before her death.
She made a few silent films, but sound catered better to her theatrical skills and, in particular, her resonant voice. She was a regular in the comedies of Wheeler and Wolsey.
Howland made only one musical at MGM, playing Josephine in A Lady’s Morals.
Wallace Fitzgerald Beery (1885-1949) shares with Edward G Robinson the honour of being the 1930s’ most unlikely-looking star/leading man. Beery was, during his heyday, successfully marketed by MGM as a lovable slob, but seems to have been disliked by virtually everyone he worked with, for his constant upstaging and unpleasant behaviour. Jackie Cooper, who worked with him four times when a child actor, claimed they, after Beery died, they “couldn’t find eight guys to carry his casket”.
Wallace Beery was that rare entertainer who actually did run away from home to join the circus. A few years later he began stage work, singing in comic operas, and then on Broadway and in summer stock.
He made his first film, for Essanay, in 1913, the first of more than 200 appearances. He also directed a number of shorts for Essanay and for Nestor Pictures between 1913 and 1919.
Beery specialized in playing villains during the 1920s, though one of his more prominent roles was as King Richard in Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (1922). And in 1925 he was cast as Professor Challenger in First National’s The Lost World.
MGM signed Beery as a character actor, but he unexpectedly became a leading man after being teamed with Marie Dressler in Min and Bill (1930). He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Champ (1931), tying with Fredric March (who had actually received a higher number of votes).
Beery appeared three times in MGM musicals. In A Lady’s Morals, he had a supporting role as P T Barnum. In Going Hollywood, he features in archival footage at a premiere. And in A Date with Judy, his penultimate picture, he was top billed as Elizabeth Taylor’s dad.
Mary Willie Grace Moore (1898-1947), ‘the Tennessee Nightingale’, is thought of as an opera singer who, like Lawrence Tibbett, was enticed to Hollywood and a lower form of musical entertainment. In fact, Grace Moore was no stranger to performing popular songs. She had funded her training by singing in nightclubs, and made appearances in Broadway revues in the early 20s, well before she made her 1928 debut at the Metropolitan Opera.
Moore’s ambition in going to Hollywood, she said later, was to “help carve a niche for good music in the then-developing field of sound pictures”. So ‘The Tennessee Nightingale’ went to play Jenny Lind, ‘the Swedish Nightingale’, in A Lady’s Morals. The only thing worse than the film’s title, Moore claimed, was her acting. If her acting was not everything that might be desired, it was so in two languages, as she also starred in the French-language version.
Moore and Tibbett were subsequently paired in New Moon, and then she called it a day on screen acting and went back to the stage. With the downturn in the popularity of film musicals, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Moore returned to Hollywood in 1934, and made six pictures for Columbia, including the very successful One Night of Love (1934). She made her ninth and final film in France, Louise (1939), directed by Abel Gance.
Grace Moore’s life and career ended tragically in 1947 when she died in a plane crash. She was later portrayed by Kathryn Grayson in Warner’s lacklustre biopic, So This is Love (1953).
