11,721 stories by "Trav S.D."
Edith Fellows (1923-2011) is chiefly remembered as a child star, although her career lasted (with gaps) for over 65 years. Fellows was only five years old when cast as a bratty kid in the hi…
 Marie Lloyd Jr (Maud Courtenay, 1888-1967) was the daughter of the top English music hall star of her day. Her mother, Marie Lloyd was only 18 years old when she was born and already a …
Mary Howard (1913-2009) first came on to my radar as the ingenue in the Frank Morgan classic The Wild Man of Borneo (1941), originally devised as a vehicle for W.C. Fields. Her credits we…
Ruth Donnelly (1896-1982) figured as a character actress in a number of classic comedies and musicals such as Alibi Ike (1935) with Joe E. Brown, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), the "Annabel"…
May 16, 1980 was the national release date for the hit movie Fame. This film and the eponymous TV series that followed (1982-87) were highly inspirational to me as a teenager, and no doubt t…
This post is adapted from a talk I gave at the Coney Island Museum in August, 2019, in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of my favorite film The Wizard of Oz (1939). We share it today…
As you can imagine your correspondent has been doing a crap-ton of writing during this lockdown, but now the process has begun of "getting it out there". It begins today with this video inte…
May 14 is the natal day of New Hollywood Boy Genius George Lucas (b. 1944). Having written about his most successful movie franchise just a few days ago, I thought today might be a propitiou…
Having had many occasions to refer to the Brown Bomber Joe Louis (1914-1981), we thought it time he should rate his own post here. Unlike most of the pugilists we've written about, Louis cam…
I feel like I've been hit by a truck. David Green, my stage manager on I'll Say She Is has died of Covid-19. David wasn't a professional stage manager (though he was in the theatre) but we n…
This snippet was generated for upcoming publication in a popular vintage magazine, but I'm missing two vital snippets: from whence she came, and whither she wandered. The subject in question…
MA JANIS Elsie Janis was so dependent on her domineering stage mother that she remained in some senses a "child star" until well after her fortieth year. Ma Janis did everything for her: coa…
Reginald "Reggie" Wesgate Rymal (1921-2002) got his start in Toronto as a teenage yo-yo champion, but his ball-and-paddle act in nightclubs, film and television is what brought him brief fam…
50 years ago today, the Beatles' sad swan song Let It Be was released. Then and now, there was much to confound and confuse the casual observer about this ill-fated project. For just a few e…
Clapham and Dwyer were a British music hall comedy duo of the 1920s and '30s. The team consisted of Birmingham native Charles Clapham (1894-1959) and William Henry "Bill" Dwyer (1887-1943), …
Today a celebration of circus strongwoman Katie Sandwina (Katherine Brumbach, 1884-1952). It seems extraordinary to me that she had the same birthday as Vulcana, another famous performer in …
I've had a couple of dozen occasions to refer to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) on this blog. This fairly flimsy, scattershot post is frankly just to have something to link to! Freud's core theor…
Marty Brill (b. 1932) " am I right? Brill has had his finger in many pies over the years, except the middle finger of his right hand, which he lost due to an accident, which is probably why …
To learn more about show biz history, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and for more on classic comedy please read Chain of Fools: Sile…
Pat Carroll (b. 1927) has been entertaining audiences for over 70 years. I certainly recognized her onscreen when I was a kid, and that was three decades after she'd originally got rolling. …
Since we're all going to die, today I deliver a heresy: Â Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) is a figure I respect enormously as an icon and a star but most of whose movies I have little use for. …
We find the qualifier in the headline necessary to differentiate our present subject from the pioneering female stand-up comedian Jean Carroll, who'd been in the team of Carroll and Howe. To…
More than a few thoughts, lifted from my notebooks, to mark the birthday of playwright/screenwriter William Inge (1913-73). I was guilty of being dismissive of Inge for many years, mostly…
Today Hedda Hopper (1885-1966) is almost exclusively remembered as a Holy Terror of a right-wing gossip columnist, champion of Joan Crawford, J. Edgar Hoover, and HUAC, and scourge of Charli…
There is a herky-jerky aspect to the career of Betty Ross Clarke (May Clarke, 1892-1970), preventing her career from attaining the kind of momentum it required to really get going. Clarke wa…
