Each year, Cinema Paradiso reflects on the achievements of those film folk who were born one hundred years ago. Welcome to the 2024 edition of the Centenary Club.
The first film studio had been opened in Hollywood in 1911, with Al Christie's Nestor company being joined by 15 others by the end of the year. It wasn't until 1924, however, that the Studio System came into its own, when the C.B.C. Film Sales Company reconfigured itself as the Columbia Pictures Corporation in January, while April saw Marcus Loew acquire Metro Pictures, the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The impact of the Hollywood studios would be felt worldwide, with MGM claiming to have more stars than there are in the heavens. Mogul Louis B. Mayer entrusted the production side to wunderkind producer Irving G. Thalberg, whose sure sense of public taste soon led MGM to becoming Hollywood's most prestigious studio. But Thalberg had conducted a feud at Universal with actor-director Erich von Stroheim and it reached its apogee during the production of Greed (1924) at MGM. Dubbed 'The Man You Love to Hate' for his aristocratic on-screen characters, Von Stroheim had a reputation for extravagance as a director and Thalberg insisted on cutting his adaptation of Frank Norris's bestseller from around nine hours to two. The excised footage was destroyed, so the version available from Cinema Paradiso is the only one that remains.
Thalberg and Mayer also decided to pass on the rights to L. Frank Baum's beloved children's book, 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. Consequently, the long-forgotten Chadwick Pictures got to star comics Larry Semon and Oliver Hardy in The Wizard of Oz (1925), although MGM would produce its own version, Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939), which celebrates its 85th anniversary this year. Among the notable pictures marking their centenary are John Ford's classic Western, The Iron Horse; Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael; Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen: Siegfried and Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge; Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine; Yakov Protazanov's Aelita: Queen of Mars (which was the first feature about space travel); Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr.; Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad (starring swashbuckling superstar, Douglas Fairbanks); Paul Leni's Waxworks; and two F.W. Murnau gems, The Grand Duke's Finances (which can be found on Early Murnau ) and The Last Laugh, whose impact on film technique we explored in The Last Laugh - The Film That Changed Cinema.
American cinema might have been different had Thomas Ince not lost his life on 15 November 1924. A key figure in the evolution of Hollywood and renowned as 'the Father of the Western', Ince was shot aboard the yacht of press baron William Randolph Hearst. Mistress Marion Davies and slapstick king Charlie Chaplin were guests on 'The Oneida' and Peter Bogdanovich memorably speculated about the crime in The Cat's Meow (2001).
Seven years earlier, Chaplin had formed United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith to ensure greater control over his work. Griffith (the director who had done so much to shape narrative conventions that are still used today) left UA in 1924, parting with a claim made in Collier's magazine that has proved dismayingly wide of the mark. 'In the year 2024.' Griffith averred, 'the most important single thing which the cinema will have helped in a large way to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the civilised world all armed conflict. Pictures will be the most powerful factor in bringing about this condition. With the use of the universal language of motion pictures the true meaning of brotherhood of man will have been established throughout the Earth.' Sadly, the coming of sound in 1927 meant that the language came to predominate over imagery that had been accessible to all and reinforce the notions of nationalism that brought about the Second World War.
JANUARY
Born in Leeds the day after Twelfth Night, Geoffrey Bayldon (7 January) is the first entrant in the 2024 Centenary Club. A prolific supporting performer, he might have been a household name had he accepted an offer to headline Doctor Who (1963-). Instead, he will be remembered for two children's shows, as the bumbling magician in Catweazle (1970-71) and as Crowman in Worzel Gummidge (1979-81). However, he also played Q in the James Bond spoof, Casino Royale (1967), and the prison governor in the film version of Porridge (1979), while remaining busy until shortly before his death at the age of 93.
Curiously, Ron Moody (8 January) also turned down the chance to be a timelord, when he opted not to succeed Patrick Troughton in 1969. The year did, however, see him win a Golden Globe and earn an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Fagin in Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968). Type his name into the Cinema Paradiso searchline to discover his other credits, which include Murder Most Foul (1964), The Twelve Chairs (1970), and The Animals of Farthing Wood (1993-95). Moody also lived into his nineties, but Anne Vernon (9 January) is still with us! Born Edith Antoinette Alexandrine Vignaud in Saint-Denis, she appeared in such British pictures as Warning to Wantons (1949) and The Love Lottery (1954). But her best work came on the continent in the likes of Jacques Becker's Edward and Caroline (1951), Roberto Rossellini's General della Rovere (1959), and Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), in which she played Catherine Deneuve's mother.
Also born on 9 January, Sergei Parajanov trained at the VGIK film school in Moscow under Aleksandr Dovzhenko. However, he rejected the Kremlin's accepted form of socialist realism and combined avant-garde theories with visual symbolism in Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964). He further antagonised the authorities with The Colour of Pomegranates (1969), a tribute to the 18th-century Armenian poet, Sayat-Nova, and was arrested in 1973 because of his bisexuality. Film-makers from around the world petitioned for his release and he was eventually able to make The Legend of the Surami Fortress (1985) and Ashik Kerib (1988) before he died at the age of 66.
Having become a familiar face in commercials and movie bits, Guy Williams (14 January) became a small-screen star in Zorro (1957-61) and Lost in Space (1965-68), in which he played Jupiter 2 commander, Professor John Robinson. He retired to Argentina and we stay in Latin America to celebrate the career of Katy Jurado (16 January), the Mexican who became the first Latina to win a Golden Globe for Fred Zinnemann's Best Picture winner, High Noon (1952), and the first to receive an Oscar nomination for Edward Dmytryk's Broken Lance (1954). Despite making further Westerns, including Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks (1961) and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Jurado also compelled in Luis Buñuels The Brute (1953), Carol Reed's Trapeze (1956), and John Huston's Under the Volcano (1984). Sadly, none of Jurado's award-winning Mexican pictures are available on disc in the UK,
A certain kind of comedy springs to mind at the mention of Benny Hill (21 January) and Cinema Paradiso has lots of clip compilations from The Benny Hill Show (1969-89) on offer. But Hill started out as a comic actor and he makes fine contributions to Who Done It? (1956), Light Up the Sky (1960), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and The Italian Job (1969). While Hill's Angels tended to be the ones in a state of undress, no show featuring Brian Rix (27 January) would have been considered a success unless his trousers fell down. Later ennobled for his charity work for Mencap, Rix made his name on stage in Whitehall farces like Don't Just Lie There, Say Something! (1974). But he also amused in screen romps like The Night We Dropped a Clanger (1959) and The Night We Got the Bird (1961).
Historians aren't sure if the Indian actor born on 27 January 1924 was named Sabu Dastagir or Selar Shaik Sabu. What's not in doubt is that he became a major star after producer Alexander Korda promoted him in Elephant Boy (1937), The Drum (1938), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and The Jungle Book (1942). Universal paired him with Jon Hall and Maria Montez in Arabian Nights (1942) and Cobra Woman (1944). But Sabu's fortunes declined in Europe after Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) and he was only 39 when he died suddenly in 1963.
Born in Chicago on 29 January 1924, Dorothy Maloney dropped the 'y' from the name she had used during a brief stint at RKO and reinvented herself at Warner Bros. She excelled as the bookstore clerk who flirts with Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), but remained a B-lister for the next decade, despite solid displays opposite John Ireland in The Bushwackers (1951) and The Fast and the Furious (1955). Refining her technique on television, she followed a hit as an adulterous wartime wife in Battle Cry (1955) by playing Liberace's sweetheart in Sincerely Yours (1956). Everything changed, however, when she went blonde and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956). The German reunited her with Rock Hudson in The Tarnished Angels (1957). There are plenty of later credits to choose from at Cinema Paradiso, but the highlight of Malone's later career was her performance as Constance MacKenzie on the iconic soap opera, Peyton Place (1964-68).
Born in County Offaly, Bernadette O'Farrell (30 January) met Frank Launder during the shooting of Captain Boycott (1947) and worked with her director husband of 47 years on The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953), and The Bridal Path (1959). However, she was best known for playing Maid Marian opposite Richard Greene in ITV's pioneering series, The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-57).
FEBRUARY
Where do you start with someone like Lee Marvin, who was born in New York on 19 February 1924? He won a Purple Heart during the war and got hooked on acting when asked to stand in during a rehearsal while working as a plumber's mate. After jobbing in plays, films, and TV shows, he threw a cup of scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) and Hollywood realised it had a new troublemaker on the block. He led The Beetles against Marlon Brando's Black Rebels in Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One (1953), menaced a one-armed Spencer Tracy in John Sturges's Bad Day At Black Rock, brought psychological complexity to a bank robber in Violent Saturday (both 1955), and gave John Wayne and James Stewart a run for their money in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
We're just cherry-picking here, as Marvin is such an unpredictable actor that we would recommend everything you can find by tapping his name into the Cinema Paradiso searchline. His assassin bristles with menace in Don Siegel's The Killers (1964), but Marvin was keen to show another side to his screen persona and won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for doubling up as the vicious Tim Strawn and the sozzled Kid Shaleen in Cat Ballou (1965). He got to show his comic chops again in Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Joshua Logan's musical Western, Paint Your Wagon (1969), which brought Marvin a UK chart topper with 'Wand'rin' Star'. But he was in tough guy mode again in Richard Brooks's The Professionals (1966), John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968), and for a run of good old-fashioned 1970s action flicks.
Click and order any on the list. You won't regret it, although his finesse in John Frankenheimer's take on Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (1973) particularly impresses. Undaunted by refusing to play Quint in Seven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), Marvin reminded everyone of his integrity and power in Samuel Fuller's combat classic, The Big Red One (1980). Solid turns followed in Death Hunt (1981) and Gorky Park (1985), but he deserved to go out on a better picture than Menahem Golan's thick-ear actioner, The Delta Force (1985).
In 1998, a panel of Czech film critics declared the country's finest director to be František Vlácil (19 February). Having learned his trade making training and propaganda films in the army, he made an immediate impact with his debut feature, The White Dove (1960). The excellent Second Run label enables Cinema Paradiso to bring you this pacifist allegory, along with the historical trilogy of The Devil's Trap (1961), Marketa Lazarová (1967), and The Valley of the Bees (1968) on which Vlácil's reputation rests. In the wake of the Prague Spring, he was excluded from Barrandov Studios following Adelheid (1969) and one holds out hopes that mid-career offerings like Smoke on the Potato Fields (1976) and Shadows of a Hot Summer (1978) will eventually come out on disc.
The same wish is extended to the 1970s classics directed by Claude Sautet (23 February), notably his collaborations with Romy Schneider on The Things of Life (1970), Max et les Ferrailleurs (1971), and the Oscar-nominated A Simple Story (1978) to go alongside César and Rosalie (1972), which pairs Schneider with Yves Montand. Another welcome addition would be the ensemble drama, Vincent, Paul, François, et les Autres (1974). But Cinema Paradiso users do have access to the exceptional film noir, Classe tous risques (1960), and the Emmanuelle Béart duo of Un cœur en hiver (1992) and Nelly et Monieur Arnaud (1995).
Born in Tokyo on 24 February 1924, Chikage Awashima continued acting on stage in Japan until she was in her mid-eighties. She worked on screen with some of the country's most significant directors, including Minoru Shibuya, Keisuke Kinoshita, Tadashi Imai, and Mikio Naruse. However, we shall have to content ourselves with her deft performances in the Yasujiro Ozu trio of Early Summer (1951), The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), and Early Spring (1956) - the latter of which can be found on Three Melodramas - and Masaki Kobayashi's remarkable adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa's pacifist tome, The Human Condition, in which the three features are subtitled No Greater Love, Road to Eternity (both 1959), and A Soldier's Prayer (1961).
MARCH
No self-respecting TV show set in the north could afford to ignore Mancunian John Comer (1 March) if it wanted to seem authentic. He had won a film contract with the Boulting Brothers in a Butlin's talent contest and featured in I'm All Right Jack (1959) before playing father to Hayley Mills in The Family Way (1966) and Richard Beckinsale in The Lovers! (1973). He had stints in Coronation Street and Emmerdale, but is best known as Sid the café owner in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-83) and Les Brandon in the wonderful Peter Tinniswood's I Didn't Know You Cared (1975-79).
Novelist and playwright Kobo Abe (7 March) has often been called the Japanese Franz Kafka. He collaborated on three landmark films with director Hiroshi Teshigahara and Pitfall (1961), Woman of the Dunes (1964), and The Face of Another (1966) are all highly recommended. As is Luchino Visconti's Bellissima (1951), which allowed Walter Chiari (8 March) to demonstrate that he was more than just a comic actor. Now known as much for an affair with Ava Gardner and a cocaine bust as his acting, Chiari was a prolific and popular star and Cinema Paradiso users can find him in Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Orson Welles's Falstaff: Chimes At Midnight (1966), and Terence Young's The Valachi Papers (1972).
Also born on 8 March 1924, Sean McClory was discovered on the stage of Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre and racked up over 100 credits in Hollywood. John Ford used him in The Quiet Man (1952) and The Long Gray Line (1955), and he notably took on irradiated ants in Them! (1954) before settling into episode television. Born Wally Stott in Leeds on 10 March, Angela Morley became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Academy Award, as the co-composer of songs for The Little Prince (1974) and The Slipper and the Rose (1976). While still credited as Stott, she wrote the famous tuba theme for radio's Hancock's Half Hour (1956-60) and its TV spin-off (1957-61) . Following Watership Down (1978), Morley worked primarily in Hollywood, winning three Emmys and collaborating with John Williams on his most iconic scores for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
Born with the surname Sullivan in New York, Bonar Colleano (14 March) came to Britain at the age of 12 with his family's circus. He became a familiar face in postwar British cinema, playing American airmen in Anthony Asquith's The Way to the Stars (1945) and Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Although he often took supporting roles, Colleano landed leads in Once a Jolly Swagman (1949) and Dance Hall (1950) after playing Stanley Kowalski opposite Vivien Leigh in Laurence Olivier's West End production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, for which Leigh would win her second Oscar in 1952. Despite success with Diana Dors in Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? (1953), Colleano made occasional trips Stateside in the hope of finding fame in his homeland. But his career ended tragically with a car crash in Birkenhead in August 1958.
Seemingly never off American television screens for three decades from the 1960s, Philip Abbott (21 March) made occasional features like Those Calloways (1965). But his run alongside Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. in The F.B.I.
(1965-74) isn't on disc in the UK. Neither is Three's Company (1976-81), which is where Norman Fell (24 March) became a familiar face. An Actors Studio alumnus, Fell joined the Rat Pack in the original Ocean's 11 (1960) and Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968), but was more memorable in the Mike Nichols duo of The Graduate (1967) and Catch-22 (1970).
An Obie-winning stage actor long before he came to film, Roberts Blossom (25 March) achieved cult status as Ezra Cobb in Deranged (1974), which was based on the crimes of serial killer Ed Gein. Having shockingly chopped off his own fingers as Doc in Don Siegel's Escape From Alcatraz (1979), Roberts's lugubrious presence graced such pictures as John Carpenter's take on Stephen King's Christine (1983), in which he sells the malevolent 1958 Plymouth Fury. He also locked horns with Macaulay Culkin as Old Man Marley in John Hughes's Home Alone (1990) before retiring to write poetry.
Osaka native Machiko Kyo (25 March) started training as a dancer when she was 12. She shot to fame as the wife in Akira Kurosawa's game-changing masterpiece, Rashomon (1950), which demonstrated that the camera could lie. Collaborations with some of Japan's leading directors led to her becoming one of the country's first sex symbols, with Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953), Yokihi (aka Princess Yang Kwei Fei, 1955), and Akasen Chitai (aka Street of Shame, 1958), Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1953), and Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds (1959) all being available from Cinema Paradiso. Frustratingly, Kyo's Golden Globe-nominated turn alongside Marlon Brando in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) is not on disc, but we can bring you Kyo's striking performance in Hiroshi Teshigahara's aforementioned The Face of Another.
Winding up the March contingent of the 2024 Centenary Club is Freddie Bartholomew, who was born in London on 28 March. Trained at the Itala Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, he appeared in a clutch of British films, including Miles Mander's Fascination (1931), before being spotted by David O. Selznick and George Cukor during a scouting trip. Cukor cast Bartholomew in the lead of MGM's version of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, which the 11 year-old followed by playing Greta Garbo's son in Clarence Brown's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (both 1935).
Selznick borrowed Bartholomew to headline Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) before he returned to MGM to help Spencer Tracy win a second consecutive Best Actor Oscar in Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937), which was based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling. However, wrangles between his guardian aunt and his estranged parents cost Bartholomew his MGM berth and his popularity dipped as he grew, in spite a solid display in Robert Stevenson's Tom Brown's School Days (1940). After war service, Bartholomew took US citizenship and worked as a television producer.
APRIL
What are the chances of two of the biggest stars in 1950s cinema being born on the same day? A 3 April birthday is about all Marlon Brando and Doris Day shared, however, as he was the Method king while she was the queen of the mainstream. Cinema Paradiso readers should know all about them, as we have brought you an article on each: Getting to Know Doris Day and Brando: A Centenary Celebration. Click on the links to find out more, but we'll toss in a bonus that Brando's pal, Wally Cox, also joins the Centenary Club, as the character actor who appeared in Fate Is the Hunter (1964) and dozens of TV episodes was born on 6 December 1924.
Also on 3 April, albeit in Brixton, Peter Hawkins was born to a police inspector and a pianist with a gift for mimicry. It was only after war service that Hawkins realised he had a talent for voiceover work. Younger viewers would have heard him as the Oddle-Poddling Bill and Ben in Watch With Mother's Flower Pot Men (1952-53) and as Zippy in Rainbow (1972-92), as well as diverse characters in SuperTed (1983-86), 'The Family-Ness' (1984-85), and Jimbo and the Jet-Set (1986-87). He also did all of the characters in Captain Pugwash (1974-75), which really should be on disc. But Hawkins is best known for collaborating with David Graham (who died on 20 September at the age of 99) on the incomparable voices for the Daleks on Doctor Who (1963-).
Born in Wenatchee, Washington on 4 April, Norabelle Roth was spotted by Bob Hope's agent as she became her hometown's Apple Blossom Queen. She modelled alongside Marilyn Monroe (with whom she appeared in We're Not Married, 1952), while taking uncredited bit parts. But she changed her name to Noreen Nash after playing J. Carroll Naish's daughter in Jean Renoir's Oscar-nominated drama, The Southerner (1945). She remained lifelong friends with the revered French director, but the remainder of her career was spent in B-movies like Phantom From Space (1953), although she did get to play film star Lona Lane in George Stevens's epic Edna Ferber adaptation, Giant (1956).
Nash quit acting in 1962 to write books. Dubliner Doreen Keogh (10 April) was a librarian's daughter, who pulled the first pints at the Rover's Return as Concepta Riley in Coronation Street (1960-). She had already been acting on television for 12 years and would go on to steal scenes with disarming ease in Ballykissangel (1996-2001), Father Ted (1995-98), and The Royle Family (1998-2006), in which she excelled as dotty neighbour, Mary Carroll. Amusingly, she was Barbra Streisand's Cockney voice coach on Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970).
Inspired to dance by Fred Astaire, Stanley Donen (13 April) befriended Gene Kelly on Broadway and became his co-choreographer on Anchors Aweigh (1945) and his co-director on the classic musicals, On the Town (1949) and Singin' in the Rain (1952). Donen remained in the genre for Astaire's Royal Wedding (1951), Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954), The Pajama Game, and Funny Face (both 1957), which teamed Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. Donen would direct her again in Charade (1963) and Two For the Road (1967), with her co-star in the first, Cary Grant, having previously worked with Donen on Kiss Them For Me (1957), Indiscreet (1958) and The Grass Is Greener (1960).
Effortlessly switching between thrillers ( Arabesque, 1966), modish satires ( Bedazzled, 1968), period pieces ( Lucky Lady, 1975), manic romps ( Movie Movie, 1978), sci-fi (Saturn 3, 1980), and bawdy farce ( Blame It in Rio, 1984), Donen remained a player. He also made the occasional return to musicals with Damn Yankees! (1958) and The Little Prince (1974), although plans to star Michael Jackson in a song-filled remake of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were abandoned in 1993, when scandal broke around the singer's relationships with young guests at Neverland.
Hailing from Leeds, Philip Stone (14 April) shares a unique place in screen history with Joe Turkel. They each appeared in three films for Stanley Kubrick, with Stone's trio being A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980). He and Warren Mitchell are also the only guest stars to reprise a character in The Avengers (1961-91). Add in tons of telly and roles in pictures like Goldfinger (1964), Flash Gordon (1980), and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and it's safe to say that Stone had a fine career. And he also voiced Théonden in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings (1978).
Glaswegian Rikki Fulton (15 April) didn't do badly, either. Whether paired with Jack Milroy ( Francie and Josie: Live in Glasgow, 1988), solo fronting Scotch and Wry (1978-92), or playing off Gregor Fisher in The Tales of Para Handy (1996), he was a national institution. Bill Forsyth cast him in Local Hero (1983) and Comfort and Joy (1984), while Michael Apted put him in Gorky Park (1983) for his cruel eyes.
Walter Gotell (15 March) also had a mean stare, as we discovered in our Bond Villains triptych, as he played Morzeny in From Russia With Love (1963) and General Anatol Gogol in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977),
Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985), and The Living Daylights (1987). Having fled Nazi Germany as a boy, Gotell found himself in numerous war films throughout his career, initially in uncredited bits. From 1951, he also put in a 45-year small-screen shift, notably essaying Chief Constable Cullen in Softly, Softly: Task Force (1969-75).
Born in Maple Heights, Ohio on 16 April 1924, Enrico Nicola Mancini won four Oscars from 18 nominations and 20 Grammys. Using the first name of Henry, Mancini contributed music to over 100 films, getting his first Oscar nod for Anthony Mann's The Glenn Miller Story (1955). His theme for the TV series, Peter Gunn (1958-61) launched a 30-film partnership with director Blake Edwards that produced magical musical moments in Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961) and The Pink Panther (1963). He also wrote the adorable 'Baby Elephant Walk' for Howard Hawks's Hatari! (1962) and the haunting 'Love Theme' for Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968). And don't forget Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), Stanley Donen's Charade (1963), and Terence Young's Wait Until Dark (1967), which encapsulate his versatility.
Born in Antwerp, Ghislain Cloquet (18 April) took French citizenship when he went to Paris to study in 1940. Forging his reputation as a cinematographer on postwar shorts like Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955), Cloquet shot such classics as Jacques Becker's Le Trou (1960), Louis Malle's The Fire Within (1963), and Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). He also worked with Robert Bresson on Au hasard Balthasar (1966), Mouchette (1967), and A Gentle Creature (1968) and memorably ventured into English-language cinema for Woody Allen's Love and Death (1975) and Roman Polanski's Tess (1979), for which he won an Oscar after taking over the picture following the death of Geoffrey Unsworth.
The daughter of vaudevillians, Dolores Gray (19 April) was discovered by singer Rudy Vallee and rose through the radio ranks before making the impressive MGM quartet of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's It's Always Fair Weather, David Miller's The Opposite Sex (1956), and Vincente Minnelli's Kismet (1955) and Designing Women (1957). It's irksome in the extreme that none of these films is on disc in this country, but something of Gray's pizzazz comes across in Hollywood Singing and Dancing: The 1950s (2009). Thankfully, there are plentiful opportunities to appreciate the distinctive talents of Leslie Phillips (20 April), whose career was celebrated by Cinema Paradiso in Remembering Leslie Phillips, following the 98 year-old's demise in November 2022.
Also born on 20 April 1924, Dutch-born Nina Foch was raised in New York and rapidly made a name for femme fatality in the likes of My Name Is Julia Ross (1945) and The Dark Past (1947). Having failed to seduce Gene Kelly in Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) and having missed out on a Best Supporting Oscar for Robert Wise's Executive Suite (1954), Foch brought cool chic to the ancient world as Bithiah in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) and as Helena Glabrus in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960). Having served as George Stevens's assistant director on The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Foch built a parallel career to her extensive film, stage, and TV work as a 40-year faculty member at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts.
Julie Andrews links Ruth Leuwerik (23 April) and Jocelyne LaGarde (24 April). The 'First Lady of West German Cinema' played Maria in Wolfgang Liebeneiner's The Trapp Family (1956) and The Trapp Family in America (1958), which influenced the Rogers and Hammerstein musical that Robert Wise filmed as The Sound of Music (1965). The following year, Andrews starred in George Roy Hill's adaptation of James Michener's bestseller, Hawaii (1966), which saw LaGarde become the first Indigenous person to be nominated for an Academy Award, only to lose out to Sandy Dennis for Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).
Rounding off the first third of 1924 is Donatas Banionis, the Lithuanian actor who often had his dialogue dubbed into Russian during the Soviet era. Having played Albany in Grigori Kozintsev's King Lear (1970), Banionis became familiar with sci-fi fans worldwide after starring as Kris Kelvin in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). Acting into his late eighties, he took the uncredited role of Tovyo in Aleksandr Buravsky's Attack on Leningrad (2009), which starred Gabriel Byrne and Mira Sorvino.
