11,723 stories by "Trav S.D."
The Poet of Democracy turns 200 in a few days! Come see me pay tribute to Walt Whitman in the perfect surroundings: Theater for the New City's Lower East Side Festival of the Arts! My slot's…
Anyone my age will be flabbergasted to know what a huge star George Gobel (1919-1991) was in the 1950s, or that he remotely had anything to offer. I grew up in the 1970s, when Gobel was a fr…
All the crummy news this week put me in something of a physical funk. When the world seems too dark, a malaise can set in, and it can get hard to get things done. Yesterday though, I stumble…
The career of Dorothy Gibson (Dorothy Winifred Brown, 1889-1946), is full of hair raising twists and turns, and not just the one that took place on April 15, 1912. A Hoboken native, she sang…
As Jane in the Tarzan movies (1932-1942), Maureen O'Sullivan (1911-1998) seemed the epitome of the upper-crust colonial Brit, but that was just a matter of study and accident. She was as …
On May 16 was born the enterprising serial killer Dr. H.H. Holmes (1861-1896). Naturally we do not celebrate the day; we abjure the man and his deeds (just put yourself in the shoes of one o…
Bull Montana (Luigi Montagna, 1887-1950) was a funny professional wrestler who became a heavy in silent and early sound comedies. Because he made such a scary impression, there was something…
Just a few words of tribute for one of my favorite Pre-Code stars, Constance Cummings (Constance Cummings Halverstadt, 1910-2005). The daughter of a concert soprano, Cummings started out in …
Bald-pated, bespectacled character actor Richard Deacon (1921-1984) was one of the great comic foils of all time, and one of the first to spring entirely from the television era. For over a …
Lew Lehr (1895-1950) is someone many classic comedy and animation fans know about…without realizing that they do. Homage was paid to him in no less than 8 Warner Brothers cartoons between …
The unthinkable has happened: Doris Day has passed away at age 97. Most of us, I think, had assumed she'd never die. The woman had been retired for nearly a half century! We've blogged about…
Just to make one's life hell, not only is there a Betty COMPSON, but there is also a completely different Betty COMPTONÂ (Violet Halling Compton,1904-44), roughly contemporary, also in sho…
For Edward Lear's (1812-1888) birthday: some brief jottings on a topic I've been turning over in my head for years. At a talk I gave on the Marx Brothers and their influences a few years ago…
I've always felt a personal connection to Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003), because where I lived when I was growing up she was local. The Hepburn family beach house, where the star spent a lot…
The roll call of stage and screen personalities contains many child actors. A lucky and talented few of them managed to continue acting or performing throughout their entire lives. The vast …
Everyone else will be writing about the 50th anniversary of Abby Road and the Let It Be sessions this year, but I'm only now catching up with Revolver (although I did manage to squeeze Rubbe…
Richard Barthelmess (1895-1963) was a second generation thespian. His mother Caroline was a stage actress; he got his first professional experience as a child actor in her productions. He al…
Missouri born Robert Melvin (1920-1995) was afflicted with a condition known as neurofibromatosis, which caused distorting tumors on the right side of his face. He didn't literally have two …
I've been starting to beat the drum for this on social media, but wanted to have some more facts before I linked to it from Travalanche. Exciting news, that's what it is! The new Archeophone…
Claire Anderson (Claire Mathes, 1895-1964) came from Detroit to Hollywood in 1914, where she began appearing in melodramas for D.W. Griffith's Reliance-Majestic studio opposite stars like Wa…
Russell Hunting (1864-1943) was an actor with the Boston Theatre Stock Company when he got in on the ground floor of an exciting new medium " sound recording. Starting in 1891 he began makin…
This is a truncated version of a talk I gave at the Coney Island Museum on May 4, 2019. In many cases I've already posted articles about different subjects mentioned in the post. Just click …
The story of the great clown George Carl (1916-2000) is a lesson in hangin' in there. Born in Ohio, Carl joined the circus as a teenager. By the early 1950s he had established himself in an …
Totie Fields (1930-1978) occupied a perfect show biz niche. A stand-up comedian and singer, her act was basically that she was an overweight Jewish woman, which was much more of an iconoclas…
Full disclosure: the Tribeca Film Festival closed yesterday! So you'll have to seek these movies out in your nabe or when they stream. Somehow I managed to see three films in the festival th…
