11,714 stories by "Trav S.D."
Hollywood director and producer Richard Donner (Richard Donald Schwartzberg) has passed away at age 91. I've written about a few of Donner's films, as it happens: Salt and Pepper (1968), Sup…
Today we salute actress Barbara Weeks (Susan Kingsley, 1913-2003). Weeks is often confused with another actress of the same name who appeared in five Broadway plays from 1927 to 1936, was a …
Tonight on TCM at 8PM Eastern, Yankee Doodle Dandy, one of the very best of Hollywood show biz bio-pics, as well as one of the best onscreen snapshots of vaudeville, directed for Warner Brot…
Long time readers of this blog know that its author possesses no shame and will brag on the smallest pretext, Our pride this morning stems from the near certainty that I have appreciated the…
The sad tale of Trent "Junior" Durkin (1915-1935) is normally told in the form of a footnote to Jackie Coogan's life. Today, we'll let Junior be the star. Durkin was the son of an Atlantic C…
A brief bow of the head to honor Thomas A. Dorsey, a.k.a. Georgia Tom (1899-1993), not to be confused with the later big band leader Tommy Dorsey. This Dorsey was a minister's son, who grew …
This may be the only complete biographrical article on multi-talented Jack LeMaire (1911-2011, sometimes rendered "Le Maire") that you will find on the internet. His interesting career broug…
Virginia Vance (1902-1942) was in nearly 100 comedies between 1922 and 1929, almost all of them, naturally, silent. Born in Chicago, raised in Toronto, Vance was 20 years old when she made h…
Myron Cohen (1902-1986) performed the sort of act that's largely extinct from the mainstream entertainment landscape nowadays. The closest I can compare him to from his own time is George Je…
As some of you know, I am a huge aficionado of the disaster movies of the 1970s (we have a whole section devoted to the genre), and well, this one seemed rather timely, wot? Heatwave! (1974)…
The perennial family classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released on June 30, 1971. A rather dismissive article in The Guardian prompts me to add my voice to the chorus of the …
Richard Lewis (b. 1947) is an extremely funny guy (I've been a fan almost since the beginning) yet I can't help but talk about him in terms of other comedians. He seems primarily influenced …
Ruth Attaway (1910-1987) enjoyed an amazing career, beginning with her role as Rheba in the original Broadway production of You Can't Take it With You (1936-38) and concluding with the pivot…
Good news of a kind today " Broadway re-opens with the resumption of Springsteen on Broadway at the St. James Theatre. Normally I write about artists on their birthdays….which makes it pro…
Billy Curtis (Luigi Curto, 1909-1988) may have the most impressive resume of screen credits of any professional little person of his time. As it happens, I saw him just yesterday in Alfred H…
Like her frequent co-stars in the movies Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, June Presser (1920-1984) had a background in vaudeville. Hailing from New Orleans, June formed an act called The Prei…
Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) directed a long list of cherished Hollywood movies, including 12 Angry Men (1957), The Fugitive Kind (1960), A View from the Bridge (1962), Long Day's Journey Into N…
Big news for fans of Burns and Allen! Writer, producer, actress, and (not incidentally) Gracie Allen impersonator Lauren Milberger has adapted her biographical play The Raconteurs: A Story o…
You may have seen the dance team The Bernard Brothers caper and hoof in such movies as Paris Nights (1951), Gobs and Gals (1952), and Decameron Nights (1953). The senior partner was Maryland…
A few scattered word about 20th century magician and ventriloquist Stanley Burns (1919-1998). Burns, whose real first name was Schlomo, was a friend and cohort of Yeshiva University Professo…
Spin-off though it may have been we have had over a dozen occasions on which to mention The Bionic Woman (1976-78) so we take the opportunity of its star's D.O.B. to flesh out the portrait s…
Three cheers today for a very important figure in modern comedy history, the great Joe Flaherty (b. 1941). Among his SCTV cohorts (John Candy, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Ma…
Some little attention today to big bandleader Kay Kyser (James Kern Kyser, 1905-1985), a major pop culture figure of the 1940s whose early retirement in 1950 robbed fans of his ebullient per…
Today marks the 100th birthday of Jane Russell (Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell, 1921-2011). I have to marvel at the aptness of her screen name (and the fact that it is her given one), for …
What a confluence today. The first day of summer alligns with the birthday of Brian Wilson (b. 1942) in the same year that the Beach Boys (est 1961) turned 60 and Mike Love (b. 1941) turned …
