Edward Eleck Foster (1906-89) had a fairly anonymous thirty-six-year career, but worked with some of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers.
Sullivan started at the top in 1926, performing in Buster Keaton’s The General. Later, he appeared in Howard Hawks’s The Road to Glory (1936), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941, and Frank Borzage’s Strange Cargo (1940).
He was in Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943) and Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). He played a slave in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and one of his last films was Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961).
Along the way, Sullivan appeared without credit (as was normally the case) in Metro’s Broadway to Hollywood.
William Arthur Sullivan (1891-1946) was a hard-working character who made around ninety films, none of which have attracted a great deal of attention from film historians. His best-known film may well be MGM’s musical Broadway to Hollywood, even though it is unclear what role he actually played.
Sullivan would have been 23 when he made his debut in the serial Million Dollar Mystery (1914). He bowed out with the Raoul Walsh picture Big Brown Eyes (1936), in the auspicious company of Cary Grant and Joan Bennett.
Edwin Forrest Taylor (1883-1965) had already acted on the stage and made over two dozen films when America’s belated involvement in the First World War interrupted his career.
He returned to the stage after military service, for a time leading his own company. Screen work began again in 1926, and by the time he retired, shortly before his death, he had appeared in well over 400 films and television episodes.
Taylor was a character actor, mainly in uncredited parts, including in a couple of hundred ‘B’ westerns. He occasionally showed up in more prestigious pictures, including Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Wilson (1944), The Sea of Grass (1947) and Rancho Notorious (1952).
Despite all those appearances, Taylor was only ine one Metro musical, as a film director in Broadway to Hollywood.
Robert David Somers (1932-1982) made his screen debut aged seven months, playing Eddie Quillan as a baby in the MGM musical Broadway to Hollywood.
Some sources suggest that Somers also appeared with the Little Rascals, though it is unclear whether or not this is accurate. His adult career in the cinema began in 1953 when he worked as both actor and stunt performer on The War of the Worlds. Stunt work in film and television constituted the major part of his work over the next twenty years. Most of his work would appear to be uncredited and, in many cases, unrecorded.
Thomas Joseph Nawn (1863-1949) was a Scottish-born vaudevillian who specialized for many years in playing comic Irishmen. He and his wife Hettie toured the world with the Tom Nawn Polite Vaudeville Company, an iteration of which makes an appearance in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.
Nawn was in a few silent comedy pictures, most notably Buster Keaton’s masterpiece The General (1926).
Charles Rice (dates unknown) and Fred Cady (dates unknown) were vaudeville and burlesque performers who established a long-running partnership in 1900. They also worked in musical theatre, including touring productions of the Weber-Fields comedy Fiddle Dee Dee.
They appeared separately in a handful of films, and were seen together in MGM’s Broadway to Hollywood.
Joan Bennett, Mae Clarke, Jean Harlow, Eleanor Powell, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Lamour, Jane Powell: just a few of the stars who had the delightful Una Merkel (1903-86) as a best friend during Hollywood’s Golden Age. With an unmistakeable Kentucky twang, Merkel was rarely the star of her pictures, but was also rarely unmemorable in them.
Aged 17, Merkel worked as a stand-in for Lillian Gish on Way Down East (1920), which means it is sometimes her you see in the famous ice floe sequence. After plying the acting trade in the legitimate theatre and in vaudeville, she worked for D W Griffith again when he cast her as Ann Rutledge in Abraham Lincoln (1930).
A hard-working supporting player, Merkel appeared in forty pictures released in the five-year period 1930 to 1934, perhaps most famously partnered with Ginger Rogers in the ‘Shuffle off to Buffalo’ number in 42nd Street (1933).
Una Merkel’s most famous scene is unquestionably her fight with Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939). Both actors eschewed stunt doubles and ended up heavily bruised, as well as soaking wet from James Stewart’s bucket of water.
In the 1950s, Merkel was a successful and Tony award-winning stage actor, and was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for Summer and Smoke (1961).
Merkel’s nine MGM musicals took her from Alice Brady in 1933 (Broadway to Hollywood) to Elvis Presley in 1966 (Spinout). In between came The Merry Widow, The Night is Young, The Merry Widow, Broadway Melody of 1936, Born to Dance, Rich Young and Pretty, The Merry Widow (again) and I Love Melvin.
Edward J Peil (1882/3-1958) studied drama at university, which ultimately led him to pursue a career in acting. His obituary stated that he was in a film, Charley’s Aunt, as early as 1906, , and that he starred in the first five-reel picture in 1910. What is certain is that he began to accumulate credits in 1913, following a period working in the theatre.
Peil worked for various studios in the 1910s, including playing a German officer in D W Griffith’s The Greatest Thing in Life (1918). He also performed in yellow face in Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), doing so again in John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924) and a number of other films of the 1920s.
Edward Peil acted in well over 420 pictures, though most of his appearances in the sound era were uncredited, apart from the many ‘B’ westerns he made for minor studios.
Seven of his uncredited appearances were in MGM musicals: Broadway to Hollywood, Reckless, Girl of the Golden West, Two Girls on Broadway, For Me and My Gal, Three Daring Daughters and Excuse My Dust.
Josephine Domingue (1866-1945) was performing on the stage from 1887, initially in comic operas and musical comedies, and later in vaudeville.
Sabel was a singer more renowned for her comedic than vocal skills, yet was still known as ‘the Queen of Song’. The best-known song popularized by her was ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’, later sung in MGM’s The Florodora Girl.
Sabel was internationally known and toured widely. She was particularly appreciated in France, and Maurice Chevalier credited her with an important role in his early career.
Like many other aging vaudevillians, Sabel contributed to the aborted musical The March of Time. The footage was later used in Broadway to Hollywood, though the film’s IMDb page currently misspells her surname.
Helen Virginia Parrish (1923-59) was a prolific child actor whose adult career as a supporting player was brought to an end by her untimely death.
Parrish made her screen debut aged 4, playing Babe Ruth’s daughter in Babe Comes Home (1927). By the age of 10 she had made almost thirty pictures and been directed by Frank Capra, John Ford, Raoul Walsh and Wesley Ruggles. She later played the nemesis of Deanna Durbin in three Universal musicals. As an adult, she mainly appeared in programmers made by minor studios.
As a child, Helen Parrish was in two Metro musicals, Broadway to Hollywood and Maytime. She was the sister of editor and director Robert Parrish.
