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 …
Today being the first day of summer, and a welcome one after over a year of lockdown, I thought I would mark it with a look at the teenage beach party movie craze of the '50s and '60s. Most,…
No one knows the birthday of Eulabelle Moore (1909-1964) so we choose Juneteenth for the present post, both for the significance of the day, and the fact that we mention her in another post …
It was widely reported last night that John Paragon (b. 1954), the actor who played the genie Jambi on Peewee's Playhouse, has passed on. The causes given were heart disease and alchohol abu…
Having done a couple of posts on Paul McCartney, and over two dozen on the Beatles, I am planning a new one that will take into account his work of the last three decades, which I haven't ex…
I saw a sad, but not surprising thing on the internet recently " a clip of '80s era comedian Joe Piscopo (b. 1951) performing at some Trump rally organized by My Pillow guy Mike Lindell. Sad…
But wait! you say. We don't say "Eskimo" anymore, and anyway Eskimos aren't Icelandic! If that was your response, you don't read very carefully and have missed the quotation marks in the tit…
My curiosity about the Pasadena Playhouse has grown over the years, as I constantly stumbled over references to prominent movie star alum in writing about their lives. People I've written ab…
Charles Eldridge Griffin (1859-1914) was not only a sword swallower (as might be apparent from the pitch card above) but also a magician, fire eater, ventriloquist, contortionist, lecturer, …
What a week for silent comedy birthdays: we got Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel, Lupino Lane, Flora Finch, Louise Fazenda, Mae Busch " and what the hell, though they're not too silent I'll throw …
In the early years of this blog I would often bundle together folks who had the same birthday for shared biographical blogposts, but I soon realized the impracticality of making readers who …