As TCM winds down a month featuring one of the greatest character actors who ever stole a picture, (Claude Rains, the September Star of the Month),  my appetite for  character actors in the spotlight has been whetted. Partly in response to repeated requests from those interested readers who frequent these pages, I thought a deserving glimpse of more supporting players might enliven the month of October. Each week this month, I’ll focus one of those actors who may not have been the stars of the show, but whose work invariably stood out from the crowd of “5000 others”. This week, I thought I’d tip my hat toward at least one of the gifted Russian émigrés who trained at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Maria Ouspenskaya, whose talent came out of that creative seedbed for some of the finest actors and boldest hams, stands out among them, despite being under five feet tall. Many of her colleagues lent their credibility and indelible gifts to Hollywood, but she may be the most readily identifiable of the bunch. While hightailing it away from the Cossacks, the Whites, the Reds, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and the fascists who made life a bit too “interesting” in the first half of the 20th century from Siberia to the shores of Ellis Island, several of these actors found a pretty fair living in Hollywood, among them Akim Tamiroff, Olga Baclanova, Vladimir Sokoloff, Leonid Kinskey and Konstantin Shayne. They may never have felt completely at home in what sometimes seemed the Babylonian splendor of “barbaric” American culture in the studio era. Cut off from their cultural roots and often having lost their families and nearly their lives during the revolutionary times they lived in, these actors often proved their strength of character and professional versatility when asked to play characters of almost every class and ethnicity in American movies.

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Who might have believed that one of the more unusual bits of movie star ephemera is making a vibrant comeback?  Movie star paper dolls, once a popular marketing tool (only they called it publicity back then) designed to satisfy the audience’s desire to get close to their favorite performers, were big sellers to little and not-so-little girls back in the day.  The popularity in the late 1950s of fashion dolls like Barbie was tied to the demise of the celebrity paper dolls as a big moneymaker, and so they fell out of style.  Collectors always sought out the vintage movie star collections, but it was the incredible skill and excellent timing of artist Tom Tierney which precipitated the revival of this charming art form.  Remembering the paper dolls his mother had collected and kept, in the mid-1970s Tom created his first movie star paper doll which led to a long-standing relationship with Dover Publications.  The rise of interest in classic movies which occurred at that time (That’s Entertainment, et al) provided the perfect opportunity for these unique paper dolls to catch on and he’s been going strong ever since, joined by other artists who have all helped revive this lovely tradition.

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Today would have been the 98th birthday of beloved actress and comedienne Lucille Ball, who died a little over twenty years ago.  Of course it’s almost impossible to believe that we no longer have Lucy with us, because she’s around us every day, as solid a piece of pop culture as there is anywhere.  Even if you haven’t watched an episode of I Love Lucy in years, when you do go back it’s like visiting with an old friend.  I recently watched a few on TV and honestly was completely charmed again — they retain every bit of their comedy bite and brilliance.  Though perhaps her television credits somewhat eclipsed her movie work in the minds of the public at large, Lucille Ball started in motion pictures as a chorus girl beauty in the early 1930s, and made 80 or so films before revolutionizing television comedy twenty years later.  In honor of the great Lucy, let’s look at some clips to remember and celebrate the redhead who was as funny as she was beautiful, and a hell of an all-around actress. 

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“Maybe all that I am in this world and all that I have been and done comes down to nothing more than being a touch of color in a prosaic world. Even that is something.” ~ Errol Flynn, writing in My Wicked, Wicked Ways

Well, no. It can’t be possible. Errol Flynn at 100 is unimaginable. Yet, as of Saturday, June 20th, the great swashbuckler of the sound era passed the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1909 in Tasmania. It may seem impossible that such a milestone has been reached without a bigger celebration in Flynn‘s adopted homeland of America. However, ask yourself: For true classic movie fans, haven’t we continued to celebrate and rediscover Errol Flynn and his evergreen films over and over in the years since he left this world?

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It would figure that one of my favorite MGM musicals is one of the least traditional of that studio’s output.  I absolutely love 1955′s It’s Always Fair Weather, and particularly the sly, larger-than-life, screen-busting performance of Dolores Gray as Madeline, the late-night television hostess.  Though she only co-starred in four major films, the iridescent Gray offered her formidable array of talents without reservation in all her roles, her effervescence cascading off the screen in roles that depended on her commanding presence.  Dolores was born on June 7, 1924, and passed away on June 26, 2002, her seventy-eight years filled with memorable performances that never failed to delight her fans and captivate the critics.

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I haven’t done a nuptial-related post in a while, so I’m pleased to be able to toss a bouquet out for today, June 4th.  On this date, in 1951, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh tied the knot.  It’s always kind of fascinating when two movie stars team up in real life, but of course this was early in both their careers.  Janet Leigh had been discovered by MGM in 1947 or so and was the veteran of  more than a dozen films, including Act of Violence, the 1948 remake of Little Women with Elizabeth Taylor and June Allyson, and That Forsyte Woman.  Curtis wasn’t as far along in his career; after a tough poverty-stricken early life and service in the Navy during WW II, he was able to get in to acting school on the G.I. Bill.  He had managed to break into features, but was working his way through small roles in a selection of movies, getting experience and a name for himself. 

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The world lost an amazing performer when Bobby Darin left us in 1973, more than thirty-five years ago.  He was only 37 years old when he died, and yet he’s immortal, still a show business legend and continuing to entertain us everytime we think of him or hear him or watch one of his performances.  I’m not going to do a biographical piece in honor of his birthday — there are several wonderful, exhaustive and fascinating websites devoted to him, including The Official Bobby Darin Website and DarinLand.  Instead I’m going to recommend that you all watch Beyond The Sea, Kevin Spacey’s imaginative and heartfelt film biography of Darin from 2004.  Despite mixed reviews on its initial release, Beyond The Sea is an amazing achievement, a vibrant musical drama that will make you a fan of Darin even if you didn’t start out that way. 

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Acceptable risk vs. benefit ratios, the duality of human nature and the beautiful way that smoke photographs in black and white movies. These are some of the topics that an admittedly geeky but bright friend loved to discuss as we both studied for a professional insurance licensing exam a few years ago. At the time, I was overwhelmed trying to master enough arcane information just to squeak by on the exam for my then job,  (though I’ve never used most of it again!).

While watching The Hucksters (1947) the other night on TCM, I thought about those philosophical conversations that my fellow student and I once had during breaks in our study sessions almost a decade ago. We were trying to avoid thinking too hard about actuarial tables, state regulatory laws, death and taxes. Fortunately for me, my pal had a love of classic movies, and a background in advertising that gave him some amusingly dark insights into the wizened, manipulative heart of modern methods of persuasion. The real life people who inspired this movie might be more interesting than the film.

The rather tepid and predictable drama in this movie seems to have been biting the hand that fed it by parodying the corporate culture and publicity machines that the major studios, including MGM, had helped to create during the studio era. Based on a roman a clef by Frederic Wakeman, a former advertising account manager at the Lord & Thomas ad agency, the once controversial novel was inspired by the author’s observations and a nonfiction four part series published in The Saturday Evening Post that critiqued the growing power of the Music Corporation of America (MCA).

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